
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



U-^ 



Chap. Copyright No.. 

Shelfi.^-5.5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



SELF 

AND 

THE FATHER 



SELF 



AND 



THE FATHER 



PART I 

Person, Divine and Human, as 

Known in Psychology and 

Philosophy 

By JOHN C. C. CLARKE, D.D. 



CHICAGO 
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS CO. 



-&& 



c« 



THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 



9796 



Copyright, 1898 
By JOHN C. C. CLARKE 




TWO 



tlVEl 



^t v<a 



2nd COPY, 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
The Enigma of Life - - - - I 

CHAPTER II 

Consciousness - - - - - 3 

There is no such thing as proof, 3; Logical proof is not 
proof, 3; Consciousness, 4. 

CHAPTER III 
Self-consciousness - - - - - 6 

Consciousness is not single, 6; It reveals the person, 6. 

CHAPTER IV 
Human Person - - - - - - 8 

§1. Self -expression, 8; Person active, 9; Pleasure and 
pain, 10; Character, 10; Self-defense, 10; Love, 10; 
Taste, 11; Will, 11; Continuity, 12. 

§2. Intellect, 12; Doing does, 12; What we know, 13; 
Plato, 13; Aristotle, 14; Kant, 15; Words describing 
intelligence, 17; Reason, 18; Lego, 19; Logos, 19; 
Categories, 20; Kant's categories, 21; Experimental 
knowledge, 23; Sensation and sense-perception, 24; 
All knowledge is of concretes, 25 ; All knowledge is of 
activities, 26; Being, 27; Consciousness is an action, 
27; Knowledge relative, 28; Personal equation, 28; 
Sense-perception, 29; Faculties, 29; Attention, 30; 
Association of ideas — memory, 30; Symbolization and 
correlation, 31 ; Ideas of time, space, quantity, 32 ; Con- 
sciousness plural, 35; Idea of causation, 37; Quadru- 
ple consciousness, 37; Idea of purpose, 39; Skill, wis- 
dom, common-sense, 39; Obedience, 40; Multiple con- 
sciousness, 40. 



62 



CONTEXTS 

§3. Moral science, 40; Causation, purpose, obedience, 42- 
Ownership and rights, 42; Value, ends, quality 43' 
The first cause, 43; System, 43; Moral right, 14; Be- 
neficence in the universal system, 46; Rights of men, 
}S; Conscience, 49; Cultivable, 51. 

§4, Son/, mind, and spirit, 52; Human personality plural 
53; Soul, 53; Mind, S3; Spirit, 54; Spirits children of 
God, 55; Moral argument for immortality, 56. 

§5. Categories of human person^ <^7; Kant's principles of 
the pure understanding, 59; The Categories, 60. 

CHAPTER V 
The Divine Ferson .... 

§ 1. A physical and psychical argument, 62; Universal belief 
of the eternal uncreated existence of matter, 62 ; Argu- 
ment from design, 63; Argument from causation, 64; 
The cause of complexity and correlation, 64; Relations 
are mutual and reciprocal, 65; The Creator of atoms is 
the Creator of the world, 66; Materialism, 67; Deifi- 
cation of law, 67; Natural systematization, 68; Evolu- 
tion, 68; Involution, 69; Pantheism, 70. 

§2. An intellectual argument, 71; Idealism, 72; Skepticism 
and agnosticism, 73; Anthropomorphism, 74; Infinite 
Being and infinity, 75; Monism, unitism, 76; True 
infinity and unit, 77. 

§3. A mora/ argument, 78; Theology precedes philosophy, 
78; Suneidesis, 79; Moral design and relations, 79; 
God rules as Creator, 80; A maker is analogous to 
his work, 80; Creation by will, 80; Kant quoted, 81 • 
Plurality in the Divine Unity, 82; God our Father and 
a spirit, S4. 

CHAPTER VI 
The Relations of the Divine and Human Persons 85 
The Creator and the universe are always connected, 85; 
Providence, prayer and supernature, 86; Moral rela- 
tions, 87; Moral character, 88; God's right to create 
men with freedom of will, 8 9 ; The laws of God are 
His loves, 89; They are also His indignations, 90; Laws 
alternative, vindicatory and punitive, 90; Theodicy, 
91; Past life is persistent moral relation to God, 92'; 
Salvation, 92; Natural religion has no remedy for sin, 
92; Conscience knows no pardon, 93; Conductive phil- 
osophy hopeful, 93; Requisites in human salvation, 
94 ; Through revelations, 94 ; Through spiritual agency 
95- 



CHAPTER I 

THE ENIGMA OF LIFE 

What is a man? Who shall or can answer? Who 
even tries to describe the Living Being that pulses in 
the blood, and springs in the force of muscles, and 
thrills in the ardor of nerves, and that thinks, wills, loves, 
enjoys, suffers, hopes and fears? What is his substance 
and form? Where is his seat? What is his force? And, 
above all, what is his destiny? 

Neither Science nor Philosophy have answered these 
questions, although there can be no beginning of Phi- 
losophy, nor completion of Science, without some knowl- 
edge of what a man is in himself. Science and Philosophy 
now so far recognize this dependence, that Science is 
become an eager quest of the nature of a soul, and Phi- 
losophy more and more puts forward Psychology as its 
chief study and aim; and yet, under the name of Psy- 
chology there is studied, not the nature or being of the 
soul, but only knowledge and thoughts, and their con- 
nections and behavior. 

Every religion is a philosophy resting on some theory 
of the nature and being and destiny of souls. And so 
every soul sometimes, perhaps always, cries out, What am 
I? Am I Master, Guest, or Slave in this body? What 
are my forces of safety and danger in this whirl of earthly 
life; and what will be my nature and resources in the 
possible life hereafter? 



2 THE ENIGMA OF LIFE 

In the following pages an answer, rational and philo- 
sophical, to some of these questions is attempted. First, 
we find a reasonable beginning, or basis, of knowledge 
of ourself; and on that we try to build and develop one 
coherent and symmetrical theory of the nature of a Per- 
son. On this, or around this, arrange themselves all the 
facts and problems of life, truth and happiness. The 
field of survey is all the magnificence of glory and good 
in life. The line of study is one continuous thread, 
starting in the simplicity of the consciousness of every 
person, learned, simple or child, and ending in an assur- 
ance of the reality of all the wealth and splendor that 
are garnered in the grandest philosophy, or cherished in 
the loftiest aspirations of children of The Author of All 
Things. 

Then we make some study, in history and literature, 
of the recognition and utterance of these facts and of 
the principles of the nature and relations and destiny of 
human persons. 

If this study appears abstruse, the questions, facts 
and thoughts are those of the daily common life, and of 
the most familiar interests and experiences of all persons. 
All thought is mysterious, and all intelligence is profound. 
Only a fool has no enigmas and puzzles. Fortunate is 
he who is alive to the necessity of gathering into his 
view all the facts of his knowledge and experience, and 
of linking them by an honest logic into one intelligent 
system that, at every point, shall be true to reason and 
to life. 



CHAPTER II 
CONSCIOUSNESS 

To live is to believe something. The assertion and 
defense of beliefs is the universal passion. The cessation 
of belief is insanity or death. The hosts are pressing 
forward with a cry for truth, and often with ardor and 
sacrifice not less honorable, nor even less superb, than 
the heroism of a soldier. 

Philosophy is a war between beliefs and doubts. Its 
first question is, What is truth? A man's first step in 
philosophy brings him to a doubt of facts. His second 
leads him to a doubt of himself. To doubt well is 
magnificent. To doubt ill is contemptible, and a crime 
against nature. In the last steps of philosophy a man 
returns to a disciplined and wiser faith in himself, and, 
through this, to faith in a blessed truth and a cheerful 
world. 

In this world, and for human beings, there is no such 
thing as proof absolute. That which is com- There fa no 
monly called Proof is only a demonstration such thing 
that one belief is as reliable as some other as pr00 ' 
one. But the column of evidence rests at last on some 
unexplored ground. 

Logic does not pretend to discover origi- Logical 

.... . . , -r . , proof is not 

nal principles or primal truths. It is only pr0 of. 
an arrangement of words and sentences by 
which one of them is so laid open as to reveal whether 

3 



4 CONSCIOUSNESS 

or not another is contained in it. Logic is a process, 
not an intelligence. It can be performed by machinery. 
In the trickster's hand, logic is a device for veiling prem- 
ises, assumptions and sophistries. It has been the wea- 
pon by which truth has been murdered. 

But it may be asked, Have we not Reason which dis- 
covers truths, or furnishes fundamental principles? It 
would be easy to fill pages with mere names of men 
gifted with supreme acumen and learning, leaders in 
psychology, philosophy and theology for the millions; 
and all of these have affirmed what they called first prin- 
ciples of truth; and yet no two of these men have agreed 
as to these principles or the inferences from them. 

Do we, then, know nothing? Are there no assured 
facts, no reliable grounds of belief, no trusty principles 
of Reason? Assuredly there are these; but, because they 
are first principles they cannot be anything else. They 
cannot be deduced, argued, proven, analyzed, pierced, 
surrounded, shrunken, nor enlarged. 

There is something that we call Consciousness. It is 

the first, deepest, fundamental sense, feeling, perception, 

or whatever else you choose to call it, of the 

Conscious- m i nc i sou i reason, spirit, or whatever else 

ness. * ' 

you choose to call yourself. This is not 
proof; but it is that which occupies the point at which 
that which is called Proof aims. It is not evidence, but 
conviction. It is the last link in the chain, and the first. 
It is not logic, but premises. It is the self-assertion of 
the Living Being. This alone is knowledge; and this is 
the only conceivable knowledge. It is not logic, but 
premises. It is that from which Logic and Reason 
derive all their facts. It is the beginning and the end 
of reasoning. Whatever is not known in consciousness, 



CONSCIOUSNESS 5 

or is not fairly deducible from something in conscious- 
ness, is not provable, nor really knowable. Wherever 
beliefs may originate, or however they may be received 
or declared, they are believed only on some ground of 
consciousness, some inward compulsion that brooks no 
denials. 

But philosophers have never been honest with their 
consciousness; because it is next to impossible to be so. 
Philosophy has always been consciousness plus theories, 
plus logic, and plus innumerable follies. PhHosophers 
have derided the Common Sense of Man as gush, and 
have forgotten that there is a philosophical gush that is 
death-dealing. Ice water from mountain tops is more of 
a gush than is the life-laden spring in the valley. 

Logic begins where consciousness has preceded. 
Logic is an army, and consciousness is its commander; 
and together they are invincible and dominant. 



CHAPTER III 
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 

Consciousness never is, and never could be single. 
It is a consciousness of a feeling, a desire, an experience, 
Conscious- a belief, etc., but with this it is a conscious- 
ness not ness of Self. Even as a consciousness of Be- 
ing, it is a sense of being of some special 
sort. It is a unit; but, like all other units, it has two 
sides, or an in and an out, a to and from, a beginning and 
an end. We are always trying to do the impossible with 
consciousness; for we try to isolate it as a simple thing, 
and at the same time to bring it into a description in 
language which has only compound terms. In language 
there are no nouns which can be defined without adjec- 
tives, because in Nature there are no beings, substances, 
actions or events apart from relations which, to any in- 
telligent Being, are qualities. In language, as in Nature, 
there are no verbs without subjects, but we are always 
hunting for the noun that has no adjective, and the verb 
that has no subject, and the subject that has no verb. 

Consciousness is necessarily a consciousness of Self. 

Idealism and monism would like to see all 

onscious- verDS so iid with their subjects, and to write 

ness reveals ■> ' 

the Person " I do," or " I feel," in the mazes of a mono- 
w ° 1S gram; but consciousness refuses, and before it 

conscious. ° ' ' 

says "Do," or "Feel," it finishes saying "I." 
Self-consciousness is inscrutable, partly because in one 
6 



SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 7 

aspect it is single, and partly because in another aspect 
it is complex. It is single because it is the one fact of 
knowing. It is complex because the knower is more than 
a knower, and cannot separate himself from his relativ- 
ities, his needs, capacities, experiences and sentiments. 

But it is said by some that consciousness is at once 
the witness, instrument and substance of knowledge, and 
the judge, jury and advocate in the trial court, and hence 
there is no assurance that there is anything more than 
consciousness. But that is sophistry; for consciousness 
is never on trial as to its existence. A supposed case of 
consciousness may be on trial, but only because self- 
consciousness is confessed and made a first principle of 
fact. If the case is on trial in a court where you cannot 
throw out the witness without expelling the Judge, and 
can only impeach the Judge by denying the law of im- 
peachment, and the Judge refuses to expel himself, you 
cannot throw the case out of court. 

But there are those who say that consciousness is not 
self-consciousness, because it is not consciousness of what 
self is. This is a sophistical attempt to forestall self- 
examination by assuming for each of the words, What, 
Self and Is, an unwarranted meaning. Knowledge can 
be real without being complete. An infinite knowledge 
would be only a sum of many knowledges, each of which 
was real but narrow. It is the aim of this little book to 
show that our knowledge of our Selves is enormous; but 
it is knowledge more of actions than of being. Action 
does not beg for recognition, but enforces it. 

That which knows is He, She, You or I. Names are 
only conveniences, or garments. And so, for our con- 
venience, we say " Self " and "Person;" and the name 
Person means no more nor less than Self; and Self is 
that which knows by consciousness. 



CHAPTER IV 

HUMAN PERSON 
§ I. SELF-EXPRESSION 

We now set before us the task of discovering this Per- 
son of our Self. It is a chase as difficult, perhaps, as the 
pursuit of a moccasined man over the stony ridges of 
pathless crags. But, as trained trailers follow and dis- 
cover fugitives, and as keen-scented nostrils hang on 
invisible tracks to their end, so we enter on the search, 
hopeful and eager; for it is a pursuit of all that is best in 
knowledge and in hopes. 

To discover and describe what is meant by the names 
Self and Person, one must explore consciousness, and 
systematize all that is found therein. To do this per- 
fectly would be to gather all actual and possible biogra- 
phies, to collect all possible experiences and conceptions 
of all souls, to catch all possible enjoyment of art, music, 
and poetry, to drone with the dullard, and kindle with 
the fire of the patriot, the statesman and the enthusiast, 
or to patiently dissect nerves with the Scientist and souls 
with the Philosopher; in short, to be in touch with 
humanity in every thought and feeling. 

In this pursuit of our Self, we propose to survey first, 
not what we are, but what we do, or rather to describe 
our Selves only as doers. If there is a possibility of find- 
ing out what a Person is " In himself," or out of all rela- 

8 



SELF EXPRESSION 9 

tions with other things, we neglect that pursuit at this 
point. We follow the trail of the personality that is a 
self-conscious activity. We describe the Being whose 
life is an active self-expression: for, whatever a Person 
may be in his Being, he has adaptations to activity and 
to relations with his world. 

In the pursuit of our Self, we must notice and describe 
all the kinds of action of a Person. But this will not be 
a mere writing of a list. It will rather be like a picture 
of a busy world of people. And it will be a chart of a 
battle-field, for, to say that " A Person acts," is to raise 
the battle-flag of philosophy. Around this assertion the 
battle of the giants has raged, with consummate skill, 
and keenest and heaviest weapons. It is the ceaseless 
war between skepticism and consciousness, in which con- 
sciousness comes into the field an incorporate, irresistible 
positiveness. Personality knows itself as acting, and as 
quivering and springing with active vital force, in re- 
sponse to touches that are the impact of other actors and 
motions. Consciousness of personal doing is a protest 
against idealism, monism, and agnosticism. The thing 
or Being that does act, and can act, is a thing or Being 
that is. 

We will first observe the simplest forms in which the 
life or being of a Person expresses itself, and then come 
to the study of the highest Reason, and then ask if Phi- 
losophy can be constructed on anything but Psychology, 
and if Psychology can be constructed on anything but 
personal activities of minds, and if such Psychology is 
imbecile or glorious. 

Call up, then, this something that is named a Person. 
If you cannot weigh him nor fetter him, you can observe 
his doings. 



10 HUMAN PERSON 

See him first in pleasure or pain. He who enjoys or 

aches lives. When he thrills with delicious joys, can you 

persuade him that delight is unreal, or that 

and* ?air ^e w ^° 1S s0 na PP v ]S nothing? When he is 

torn with pain, and when, perhaps, almost all 

his sense is one concentrated agony, can you convince him 

that torment is nothing, or that he who suffers is nothing? 
This Person comes to us certifying his real-being by 

his character, or the persistent self-expression of a dis- 
position. He wants something, wants desper- 

Character. r , . , , & /, 

ately, passionately, wants always. And he 
wants to do, to do always, to do fully, perhaps violently. 
All his sense of being condenses into one sense of adap- 
tations and relations and suitableness. He who has 
these has attitudes towards them, and this is character, 
and that which has such character is a Person. 

See him, next, in the passion of self-defense against 
invasion, or dismemberment, or robbery, or humiliation, 

or dishonor. He fights for life, rights, happi- 
sdf-defense ness ' or nonor J an( * this battle-passion is the 

vital forceful springing of a living Person. 
The recoil from a lie, or a meanness, or a breach of 
fidelity, or an insult, is the life-expression of a Self, a 
personality. 

See him, next, as the Being that loves, whether with 
the gregariousness that may be a timid clinging, or that 

"enthusiasm of humanity" which to some 

minds is a synonym for religion; or whether 
it be with that liking which results from being like, and 
is an expression of character, and makes the harmony of 
life, its sunshine, its wealth; or whether with that devo- 
tion which is the paradox of self-expression, that mystery 
which word-logic declares to be impossible, and which is 



SELF EXPRESSION I I 

the most real of realities, the potent factor in all noble 
life. 

See him as a Being that has aesthetic taste, or a sense 
of excellence, beauty, agreeableness, in Nature, 
art, or music. What is this but an adjustment st etlc 
of a living noble Being to his environment? 
Excellences are not in things, but in the Persons. They 
are revelations of the presence and nature of the Persons. 

See him as the Being that wills. But shall we here 
define Will? It is the concentrated essence of the self- 
expression of a personality. It is his Self, 
moving its Self. It is the freeness of a self- 
mover. It is the sovereignty of the soul. It is the Royal 
force of a living Being, a force that may be defeated or 
misguided, but cannot be else than free. Logic cannot 
define it. Some logicians have said that a Will deter- 
mines itself. But this is to say that Will is some sepa- 
rate element in a Person, and is not the Person's Will, 
and therefore is not a Will at all. Some logicians have 
said that it is determined by motives, and the strongest 
motive. But this is to say that the Man is ruled by some 
parts of his Self, and that his Will is one part of him. 
Logic fails to define Will; but self-conscious Will ex- 
plains itself as the automatism of the compound Person 
who is the real unit of living Being. Will is the living 
Person's declaration that he is a Person, a Being of many 
parts and multiple relations and wants, and of manifold 
powers. It is the province of a Will to choose accord- 
ing to the actual, not the ideal, circumstances. A choice 
of ideals is distinct from a choice of actions. A Will 
that can take counsel of intelligence, experience, policy 
and everything else in personality and relations, is a 
Person's Will, and anything else is no Will. A Will 



12 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

that can change with circumstances is a Person's Will, 
and anything else is no Will. Will is good or bad, not 
because something else in the Man, or out of the Man, 
makes it so; but because it is the self-expression of the 
Man's Self, and is the Man's freeness, and cannot be 
anything else than free. 

See this Person also as the life that has continuous- 

ness and memory. He clings to the glory and riches of 

his past; and the shame of his past, and its 

continuity evil > wil1 n0t leaVe nim * His P aSt is the aff * U " 

ence of his present. He is what he has been. 
Neither Science nor Logic can explain this continuity of 
being. Logic is bewildered when it attempts to explain 
how a being that was can be the being that is. And 
Science that, in despair, abandons all effort to explain 
how atoms of matter hold together, is still less able to 
tell how the life or being of a soul runs in one line 
through its yesterday and its to-morrow. But, what 
Science and Logic cannot do, Consciousness does; for 
the soul that is to-day knows itself as having been long 
ago. In the science of conscious life, perpetuated iden- 
tity with one's past experiences and history is the glory 
of personal being, and is its garnered treasure. 

§ 2. INTELLECT 

We have, in the preceding pages, noted the simplest 
elements of the life of a human Person. But we have 
not seized the man, nor seen his Self. We have only 
noticed his experiences and his doings, and, in these, 
have felt the presence and the quality of the man's Self. 
The experiences in ourselves, which our consciousness, 
on its most solemn oath, will swear are real, have been 



PLATO S THEORIES 13 

like the tokens of the experiences around us; and in 
ourselves we know our fellows. But we have not found 
and grasped a man. We have, however, been conducted 
near to his presence. We have felt in ourselves, and 
noted in the world, the principle that he who does is. 

We may pass on now to view a man in his grandest 
performances and noblest experiences. We must view 
him as rational or intellectual. But we shall not find 
the man in his selfness. We shall find him only in his 
doings; yet we are in these conducted where the spiritual 
air is tempered with his presence, and his voice is heard 
and his touch felt. And by these experiences and doings 
of our own Self we recognize our own noblest vitality, 
and are conscious that our body homes not unworthily 
an heir of Heaven and a child of God. 

Students of human life, Philosophers we call them, 
have assumed that study of what a man is, and of what 
he knows, is one study. We, too, shall proceed to observe 
what a man knows, and hope from this to be conducted 
to a clear view of his nature and his destiny. 

We may, however, profitably first glance at the the- 
ories of the three greatest leaders in philosophy, Plato, 
Aristotle and Kant. 

Plato taught that a human person is an organized 
real being. He is a growth not of Earth but of Heaven. 
He has, in a previous existence, been in sight 
of, and in touch with, ideas which originated 
in God's mind and are eternal entities. He took in the 
knowledge of these ideas once, because he is of stuff 
like them, and is an individualized idea. He tried to 
establish philosophy by distinguishing between the two 
Greek verbs einai, {to be) and gignesthai (to become). He 
said that only God and ideas are, and that other things 



14 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

only become. In this he made philosophy a mere dia- 
lectical quibble about the verb to be and the noun being 
(ousia), while he really recognized nothing as existing 
except God and forms conceived by God. 

*Hence the teaching of Plato, which on his lips fasci- 
nated the world, and inspired in men a sense of living 
as Children of God, in view of eternal verities, became, 
in the mouthings of Plato's successors, a cold skepticism 
and an agnostic despair. 

Plato almost alone, perhaps we should say quite alone, 
among all the philosophers of the world, attempted to 
formulate a Psychology, or theory of what a human per- 
son is, and made this to some extent a basis of his theory 
as to human Reason. He figured a man as having in his 
head another man, who is his rational {logistikbn) part, 
wise, incorruptible, and immortal. This knows so much 
of divine truth as it has seen in a previous existence. It 
is its right and duty to dominate the whole Person. 
Then he has in his breast a second part, which is instinc- 
tive (thumoeides) and spirited. This is like a lion, impul- 
sive and heroic. Then he has a third part, which is greedy 
(epithumetikbti) and beastlike. This is like a hydra mon- 
ster, and occupies the lower body, and is earthly, sensual 
and perishable, or, if not perishable, punishable. 

Plato's most celebrated and influential, but in genius 

far inferior, successor was Aristotle. Plato had 
Aristotle. . . , , . . ... 

explained everything through his conscious- 
ness of manhood as childship of God. Aristotle and 

*Plato's men did not really live either in substance or with vital power, 
and everything vigorous and effective in men was discredited by him. Per- 
ception also was discredited, because substances which have no permanent 
form or nature can cause in men no knowledge of true beings or permanent 
forms. Man and consciousness were minimized by the very effort to glorify 
them. There was left no criterion for ideas except their harmony with each 
other in the universal system of ideas; and that harmony had to be judged by 
discredited human minds. 



KANT S THEORIES 1 5 

his men were machines for analyzing, enumerating, and 
classifying thoughts. But the machine never verified 
itself; and although this machine did its own thinking, 
its ideas neither originated in God nor in the thinker, 
but were in the material things that he saw. Aristotle 
was an incarnation of logic — cold, bare, and spiritless. 
He is the World's Master in formal logic; but his logic 
has no psychology. He had much to say about energy, 
but nevertheless he could not rise above futile verbiage 
about being and the verb to be, and his philosophy was but 
a machine moving itself from nowhere to nowhere, and 
halting at last in an arid desert of doubts and empty 
words. 

*The words used by Aristotle for names of intelli- 
gence implied, or ought to have implied, the agency of 
a man in his knowledge; but under Aristotle's pen they 
became merely names of forms of objective knowledge. 
His consciousness never asserted its authority. 

Among modern philosophers, no one has been so 
influential as Immanuel Kant. He is wonderful in his 
dialectical acumen, and minuteness and sub- 
tlety of logic. He is sometimes full of quick- ^ 
ening fire in the expression of great thoughts. He is a 
synonym for glorification of Reason. And yet he is the 
disseminator of despair and deadliness. 

Kant used all the power of his great abilities in push- 

*Nous {mind) was to him intellection, or intuition, a form of wisdom, 
but not a part nor a faculty of a Person. Although, in a vague way, he discusses 
inconclusively the question whether or not mind {nous) is conscious of itself 
(See Metaphysics, Book XI. ch. 9), or is the same entity as its perceptions 
and its objects of perception, and although in a careless way he, like all 
Greeks, spoke of exercises and even happiness of nous (Ethics, X, viii. 7), yet 
as to the question, What is a mind? he was " all at sea." (See also Ethics, I, 
ch. vi. 3, and Book VI. 2 and 11). 

Under his pen, gnosis, sunesis, efiisteme, gnome, dianoia, logismos, 
fhronesis, and aesthesis meant quality of objective knowledge, rather than 
personal exercies of a mind. Even to logistikon he discusses rather as to 
its usefulness than as to its essence. 



1 6 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

ing forward the already universal and destructive con- 
ception, or theory, that truth is to be attained only by 
logic, and in its harmony of ideas with ideas. We have 
to thank him for having pushed that line of theory so far 
that its refutation and self-destruction could not help 
following him. 

Kant glorified Reason; but it was not a man's Reason. 
Kant ignored human Mind as a factor in intelligence, 
but he did not deny it, because consciousness and con- 
science were quick in him. But his successors have 
dared to deny what he only said was not proven, and 
have scorned consciousness, and have made skepticism 
and disbelief the premises for their logic. 

Kant saw truth as something existing a priori. He 
assumed that for his starting point, and gave all his 
attention to an examination of that. But he did not 
escape from himself and his consciousness, nor from his 
sense of the operation of causation, which, as we hope 
hereafter to show, is the dominant fact and principle in 
philosophy. Hence, as he did not wish to say, like 
Leibnitz, that ideas are innate in men, and did wish, in 
some vague way, to confess the power of intellect, he 
does affirm that " Reason is a faculty of principles," and 
that there is a " Causal relation of Reason." But if we 
ask, What is a faculty? and, Of what is Reason a faculty? 
we get no satisfaction from Kant. 

Kant tried to mark out the lines within which the 
truth must be found, if there is any truth, and according 
to which our knowledge, if we have any knowledge, 
must arrange its ideas. He made logic a study of forms 
of thinking that does not think of actual things. He 
studied knowledge as something for men's minds, but 



INTELLECT 1 7 

refused to admit the minds of men as agents of their 
own activity. 

Kant's system of Reason is like a geographical globe 
prepared for a map of human knowledge. The poles, 
equator, parallels and meridians are exactly drawn, but 
there are no lands nor living beings. It is not an 
Earth, but a dead moon. It is a map of thoughts, but 
ignores the thinker. And yet this chart, as he left it, 
appears as if drawn on transparent paper, having under 
it, in strong colors, a picture of a world crowded with 
living men. The followers of Kant have, as it were, 
withdrawn that lower sheet. Kant had only said that 
Reason does not know that there is any real being; but 
his successors have said, There is no being. They have 
thrown away the globe, and have made their chart a 
shadow on the changeful surface of a cloud. But they 
have not explained the source of the light and shadow, 
nor the nature of the cloud. That which Kant called 
"Transcendental Logic" has wrecked what he called 
"The Transcendental Esthetic." 

Before we proceed to our study of Reason, we notice 
some of the names which have been given to Reason 
and the performances of intellects. These 
are as flags on the battlefields of philosophy; 1^™^ ° nce 
for, although the power of a mind to con- 
struct names as symbols of conceptions is one of men's 
grandest faculties, and is indispensable to the evolution 
of intelligence, it is nevertheless true that the fixing of 
such names has always caused a stagnation of thought, 
followed by intellectual bigotry and fanaticism. 

Every word that is used to describe or name any kind 
of human knowledge is a word designating an action of 



1 8 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

the person who knows. Know is the same as Greek 

gignosko and Latin gnosco, and means as they do, I think. 

Apprehend means seize. Perceive means take thoroughly. 

Conceive means take together, or take in myself* 

No word has performed a more important part in 

modern philosophy than the wordreason; and scarcely any 

other word has been used so irrationally. It 
Reason. , . , _ . , 

comes to us through the trench language, 

from the Latin, in which it (ratio) meant a relation, or a 
perception of a relation, or a reckoning, or a ratio, or 
a reasonableness. But it did not mean either a part, or a 
faculty of a Person. It has come to mean, in different 
mouths, four different ideas, viz.: First, universal imper- 
sonal truth; second, reasonableness; third, a faculty of 
mind; fourth, the exercise of mind in reasoning. But, 
while many use the name Reason often, and arrogantly, 
and with very positive language, almost nobody has 
made a pretense of defining it. It has been more con- 
venient for everybody to assume that his favorite idea of 
it was the right one, and the one in which to deny its 
trustiness and glory would be the act of a fool. It is a 
word which nobody has a right to use without declaring 
in which of the four meanings he uses it. If the use of 
the word could be restricted to one meaning, it might 
be of great value; but the history of philosophy shows 
the word and its equivalent to have been used for little 
purpose except ambiguity, shuffling, and tricks, and 
largely to obscure truth, and to hide the person of God. 
Another word which has exercised an enormous power 
to the present time is the verb lego in Greek and Latin. 

♦The other Greek words are these: Oida, J know, means / have seen. 
Epistamai is / stand on, and means / understand. Noeo, I think, means 
/ use mind. Dianoia, intelligence, means w^wrfzWdistributively. Eidesis, 
intelligence, originally meant seeing. Katalambatio is / apprehend, or 
catch on. 



LOGOS. 19 

It is impossible to study philosophy without examining 
and using this word; because from it are made the Greek 
equivalent for ratio, and our words logic, in- 
tellect, and intelligence. ^ eg0, 

Logos. 

The verb lego meant / lay, in Latin and Logic. 
in Greek. Intelligence means knowledge of J nte ]) ect - 

d . Intelligence. 

relations, and the faculty of knowing relations. 
Intellect means laid in relations, and the faculty of know- 
ing relations. From lego, the Greeks made the noun 
logos, the first meanings of which are ratio, proportion, 
relation, degree, and division. Later it came to mean 
word, saying, speech, state?tient, account, argument, expla- 
nation, definition, proposition, theory. Later it had a place 
in philosophy. 

Logos will often be found translated into English by 
the word reason. But it never, in Greek, meant reason 
as a part of the being of a person, or an equivalent of 
the word intellect. It had in philosophy three general 
meanings: First, the truth in universal Nature; second, 
the apprehension of that truth in (not by) the minds 
of men; third, the right expression of that truth in 
logical thought and in speech. In these three significa- 
tions it did important service, alike in the common and 
the metaphysical language of the Greeks.* We shall 
have occasion tG observe its place in the writings of 
Philo Judaeus and the Apostle John. Here we may 
well ask with much interest, What did Greek master- 
workmen in philosophy conceive to be the nature of 

*The reader who desires to study the word in Greek will find very 
elaborate definitions. See in Plato, viz. : Theaetetus, 200 to 210 ; Sophist, 259 
to 264 ; Republic, 510 and 511. 

See in Aristotle, viz.: Ethics. Book I, ch. vii, 13, 14: ch. xiii, 15, 18; Book 
VI, ch. ii, 2, iv, 4; v, 3; Book VI, ch. i, ch. v.,ch. vii. 7; ch. xi, 4; ch. xiii, 3 
and 4; Book VII, ch. i, to Book VII, ch. ii, 7. Metaphysics, Book I, ch. i; 
Book II, ch. i; Book VIII, ch. v. 

See Alcinous and Albinus in editions of Plato's works, as Appendix 



20 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

reason, or logos, and what the reasoning faculty in a 
man? 

Unfortunately, while they did not use the word logos 
as ambiguously as we now use the word reason, they did 
conceive that Reason {logos) is something existent in 
itself,* possibly originating in the Supreme Deity, but 
existent in the nature of things, and a law to all truth. 
And they never, except in Plato's and Aristotle's theories 
of eide and ideas, carefully studied the problem how this 
universal truth becomes a possession of a man. 

Earnest efforts were made by the Greeks to describe, 

scientifically and systematically, human knowledge of 

the things of the world. All the different 

know^ ideas, or kinds of knowledge of material 

Categories things, were classified, and these classes were 

grace ' named. The names given were called 

"Categories," i. e., names, or predicables. 

We cannot help admiring the acumen of the Greeks, as 

men of our western race, who, alone of all men, saw the 

importance of such logical steps in philosophy. The 

earliest schedule of categories, made by the so-called 

Pythagoreans, divided knowledge about things into four 

general classes. It said that we know things in, or as, 

ousia (being, or essence, or substance), posbn (quantity), 

poibn (quality), and pros ti (relation). 

Evidently here was an admirable beginning for a 
rational and scientific philosophy; but it was gravely 
imperfect. 

It was made from no fixed philosophical point of 

♦The word logos was commonly used only in such terms as to have logos, 
i. e., to have the universal wisdom, and in phrases with the prepositions 
with, through, on account of, according to. Logos was commonly spoken of 
as orlhds logos tes phuseos, the right reason of nature, or simply the right 
reason. From logos were made the words logizomai, to reckon; logikos, 
rational; logisttkion, the rational or intelligent faculty, and logike, the 
logical art. 



INTELLECT 2 1 

view, and therefore the categories crossed and overlapped 
each other. The first category, being, might include 
everything, or it might be merely a conception, or a 
name for a mere logical inference about what is a pre- 
requisite for any and all knowledge. The other three 
categories each had at least two viewing points — one in 
the things observed, and the other in their observer. 
The whole schedule was imperfect, because it made no 
recognition of knowledge of activities, events, concep- 
tions, and organized beings, or of life. 

Aristotle added to the four categories six others, viz.: 
chrbnos (time), tbpos (place), keisthai (situation), echein 
(possession), poiein (action), and pdschein (suffering). 
Later he added others. But, wonderful Master of 
thought and logic as he was, he only introduced new 
confusion; for the first four of these later categories are 
only itemized categories of relation, and the other two 
are categories of active or vital beings. Later, some of 
the Greeks used the word hypostasis {substance) instead 
of ousia, and made other unimportant variations of the 
schedule. It must be observed that whether they used 
the name ousia or hypostasis, or any other term, to ex- 
press such ideas as have been rendered into Latinized 
forms, as essence, existence, substance, or entity, these words 
never meant to them the verbal idea of to be or to have 
being, but always meant a material something at the basis 
of substance. 

Kant brought to the study of categories rare powers 
of analysis and logic, but he attempted a new, a differ- 
ent, and an impossible performance. He 
sought to schedule the categories of The ^g^gg 
Understanding while he excluded conscious- 
ness, experience, and all the other elements of psycho- 



22 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

Logical science. He designed that his categories should 
be names for the varieties of knowledge as purely theo- 
retical. He said, They are the a priori conceptions of 
the understanding, answering to all the logical functions 
in all possible judgments. The inevitable result was 
that his categories were, in one aspect, attributes of ob- 
jective substance, and, in another aspect, they were only 
formulas of logical processes in a thinking mind, and 
there was no way for bringing these antipodes into one- 
ness. They are words in the air, which implied the real 
existence of matter and mind, but confessed neither, 
and prepared the way for denying and insulting both. 
They are categories of matter that is not matter, and of 
mind that is not mind. While making a magnificent 
struggle to attain superhuman intelligence, Kant is like 
an eagle tossed with broken wings on the division line 
of air and sea. 

Kant's schedule of the categories is as follows : 
I. Of Quantity. II. Of Quality. 

Unity. Reality. 

Plurality. Negation. 

Totality. Limitation. 

III. Of Relation. 

Of inherence and subsistence (substance and 

accident). 
Of causality and dependence (cause and effect). 
Of community (reciprocity between the agent 

and the patient). 

IV. Of Modality. 
Possibility, Impossibility. 
Existence, Non-existence. 
Necessity, Contingence. 



INTELLECT 23 

The faults* in this schedule are more numerous than 
its words. It is a kind of revolving, intertwining lot of 
colors. It is a cute invention to persuade a person that 
he is talking or thinking of things, when he is only talking 
of words. There is a deft arrangement such that there is 
an appearance of starting with a recognition of a unit of 
being, passing through all the phases of reality and 
existence, and reaching a conclusion that a priori ideas 
have existence in necessity. In fact, all idea of being is 
excluded, either as an a priori or a deduced belief. Such 
schedules of categories as Kant's contain nothing but 
empty words, not really designed to describe either 
things or ideas. A schedule equally philosophical, but 
utterly worthless, can be produced by itemizing in three 
groups, called Relation, Quality and Quantity, all the 
words that can be made by taking the Latin words 
herence, tension, ence and sistanee, and prefixing the prepo- 
sitions ab, ad, con, de, ex, in, sub, etc. 

Let us, then, for the present drop all thought of 
scheduling the categories of knowledge as Ex eri _ 
pure reason, and let us study our Self and our mental 
experiences as rational or intelligent persons. now e ge * 

Intelligence begins in a sensation, a very simple thing 

♦The arrangement in trios is forced and unnatural. Important cate- 
gories are omitted and others are named twice, as if seen from different view- 
ing- points. Some items are only negations of others. There is no real recog- 
nition of actual quality and modality, unless the categories of relation are 
taken in such comprehensive senses as to include almost all facts. Of the 
three itemized categories of quality, reality does not mean actuality, because 
that is no more nor less than existence, which is scheduled as a modality. 
Kant's reality is not of things, but is a quality or manner in assertions. Nega- 
tion cannot be made an item of quality alone ; for it belongs equally in all 
four groups of the categories, or in none. Limitation, as used in this group, 
is limitation only in assertions. 

In general, it may be said that Kant's attempt to keep the categories in 
the old lines as quantity, quality, relation and modality, was a snare and bur- 
den to him. The whole scheme is full of tricks. It is a kaleidoscope, suscep- 
tible of all sorts of changes in its arrangements. It has a specious appearance 
of giving names to knowledge of real things ; but it is in fact only a list of pos- 
sible forms of sentences about anything or nothing. 



24 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

as long as the man does not think about it. But if he 
reflects, the sensation resolves itself into at least two, 
Sensation ^ not tnree » elements. It becomes a con- 
and sense- sciousness of his Self, and a consciousness that 
perception, something else has come into relations with 
his Self, and a consciousness of an idea of a cause of his 
sensation. Then if he asks about causation, and asks 
how he knows even what he sees or touches, and asks 
how much is true, there he is bewildered. Alas for him 
if he asks, Do I know in my brain or at my fingers' tip? 
or asks, How does a thing out of me become a knowledge 
in me? He is told, and truly, that he never saw or 
touched anything. What he has seen was only light as 
it reflected ; and light is waves of an unknown something 
that, for describing, has to be hunted by mathematics, 
and never is described or known. He is told that what 
he thinks he sees has only sent light into his eye, but 
even there he has not seen the picture that is there of the 
object, but it has done something to one of his nerves, 
and that has done something to or in his brain. He 
learns that compound or shaded colors, and appearances 
of solidity, and perception of distances, are all operations 
by himself. 

He is told, too, that when he thinks that he touches 
something, he is mistaken; for no atom touches another 
in the world. 

Blessed is he now if he does not despair, nor cease to 
think. He has only been taught that he does not know 
so simply and immediately as he supposed that he did. 
It does not follow that he knows nothing, nor that he is 
deceived. His consciousness has not been invalidated; 
for what he is conscious of is a true consciousness. He 
has only learned that there are many media between 



INTELLECT 2$ 

things and his sense of them, but he can become con- 
scious of many of these media and of their exact laws. 

What the man is conscious of in sense-perception (as 
we call perception by the senses) is that he has received 
some information. Information must always remain 
information; but there can be conveyed to any being 
just so much information as his faculties are adapted to 
receive. 

By touch, there arises in a man's mind a conviction 
(which is consciousness, or very like it) that something 
has touched him; and he has a very definite conception 
of the nature of that thing. This consciousness we must 
re-examine. Right here we must classify the facts of 
consciousness, and here we must formulate some princi- 
ples of philosophy. 

The first principle coming out of an examination of 
consciousness is this, viz.: All human conceptions are of 
concrete things. General, universal, abstract, AU our 
nominal, and conceptional ideas we have in knowledge 
abundance, but there is not one which is in an "J eas 

• are or 

our consciousness until it has been observed concrete 
in some actual concrete thing. There are no t mgs ' 
abstract facts, such as goodness, badness, right, wrong, 
truth, or falseness, except in substantial things. Imagina- 
tions of non-existent and impossible combinations and 
organizations may be in our thoughts, but no conception 
of a primal elementary idea can be in our mind that has 
not been observed in a fact or thing. A man has not 
many perceptions before he compares and classifies what 
he perceives, and gives names to the classes of ideas. 
These he calls abstract conceptions. Then he makes 
abstractions of abstractions, and principles of principles, 
true and false; but the basis of all these is his perceptions 



20 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

of concrete actual things. Indeed, the most of our 
abstract conceptions are but a notion of some single 
thing, or of a few things. An unlearned man cannot 
argue or reason without appealing to his few experiences 
and facts; and a philosopher does liitlc better. 

The second principle coming out of our examination 
of consciousness is this, viz.: All our conceptions are 
Ml our ideas of things as active. We know nothing 

knowledge whatever except actions. Science has demon- 
are of the strated that solidity, form, weight, cohesion, 
activities gravity, temperature, color, taste, smell, and 
chemical and mechanical properties of mat- 
ter are forms of motion of its atoms. In these words 
there is outlined not only the whole world of Science, 
but also the battlefield of Philosophy. Philosophy has 
only two armies and two battle-flags, although there are 
divisions and factions within the armies. The one army 
proclaims that the noblest, or most perfect, knowledge is 
of being. The other declares that all knowledge is of 
doings. Very early the Greeks recognized that motion 
and energy (kinesis and energeici) could not be disre- 
garded in philosophy; but when the methods and logic 
of Aristotle became generally used, Philosophy turned 
away from Science and devoted itself chiefly to a search 
for what is called being. Science impelled this search 
only by its weariness in the effort to find order in the 
mass and multitude of facts, and by its confirmation of 
the truth that every fact has its cause. The chief impulse 
to the search for being was the natural love of men for 
skill in logic. Under this impulse they pursue the ulti- 
mate, or first, principle in all things, and in all lines of 
study. This ultimate object of pursuit is being, or that 
which is. We pursue it under the various names of 



INTELLECT 27 

essence, substance, entity, the thing in itself, the unit, unity, 
the first cause, etc.; but whatever may be the name given, 
the object pursued has been one, viz., that which is under 
the substance, and before action, and simpler than any 
known unit. This aim is chimerical. It is even absurd. 
Men still pursue it with arts of logic, but Philosophy 
despairs in the pursuit. Men cherish in their conscious- 
ness and their logic the conviction that there is being; 
but they despair of knowing it as being or as unity;* for 
we know and think of nothing but concrete things; and 
we know, and can think of these, only by and in their 
activities. This is not to say that we know only material 
things, and that we know only by sense-perception. It 
is to say that we know an enormous amount, and know 
gloriously, in consciousness, and that our knowledge is 
of the real and the actual, and of the moving things, and 
of the living and forceful things, in their doings and 
their products. 

The logical complement to the facts just stated is 
that knowing is itself an action. But this truth does not 
depend on logic. It is a declaration of con- Conscious . 
sciousness itself. The dogma that conscious- nessisan 
ness is an action is, however, the doctrine actlon - 
about which the hottest fight of philosophy will perhaps 
always rage; for if in consciousness a man does some- 
thing, surely the man exists; but then arises the momen- 
tous question, How, if consciousness is an action, can 
we know that it is right action, and that its product is 
truth? 

Men have always, by the very names that they give to 

*It is profitable to see how the master mind of Aristotle wrestled with the 
problem. He tries to describe, or define, being by various turns of the verb 
to be, and by tricks with the prepositions, but he reaches no end. See his 
Metaphysics, Book I, chs. 2 and 3, and Book VI. 



2 8 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

primal intelligence, implied that it was an action. Per- 
ceive means seize thoroughly* Conceive is seize together. 
Apprehend is catch on. You cannot turn consciousness 
into an inactive merely recipient faculty, by saying that 
knowledge is information received; for to receive is to 
seize. 

A further part of the answer to the question, How do 
we know? is this. Knowledge, as known in conscious- 
Knowled c ness » is a seizing, by the Self, of some rela- 
ol thin-sis tion of a thing to the man's Self, or a seizing 
rive ?o rea °* some doing (action) of the thing, in which 
human facul- it is relative to the doing of the man. No 
tlcs ' matter what may be the outcome of this 

declaration, we must assert it, both as logic and as con- 
sciousness. As surely as, in a mathematical equation, 
one member equals the sum of the elements 
in the other, so surely there is in all knowing: 

equation. J ° 

a " Personal Equation," or formula of ele- 
ments and factors, a part of which are the faculties and 
activities of the man. 

But it does not follow that beliefs can be invalidated 
on the ground that they are personal. To prove that 
human knowledge resting on consciousness is false, or 
even doubtful, it must first be proved that The Cause or 
Creator of men is not able to bring true information to 
men, or that he could not make men capable of receiv- 
ing or conceiving truthfully. Is consciousness a lie 
because receive means seize? or because a Human Person 
is something more than an open-mouthed sack? Why, 
then, should negative theories have preference of right 
on the roads of philosophy? Why should we applaud 
him who compares man to a shining drop in a miry pool, 
rather than him who recognizes in man a protege* and 



INTELLECT 2g 

favorite, if not a child and image, of God? Why should 
consciousness, which no science nor logic can impeach, 
be insulted on its imperial throne? And yet there will 
always be philosophical doubters; for knowledge is 
information; and if The First Cause had endowed men 
with ten thousand senses, and their evidence furnished 
an almost infinite description of substances and of their 
doings, and if The Creator, with an audible voice and in 
a visible form, declared the truth of the information, even 
then this certification would be relative to the powers and 
activities of men, and susceptible of rejection as not 
proven; but alas for him who should reject it! 

Theories as to the nature and means of conscious 
knowledge of things by perception through the senses 
have been many. Some declare that it is only 
a combination of material sensations. Others ense ~ 

perception. 

call it a representation to the central nervous 
seat of intelligence, communicated by the nerves. Others 
say that it is a pre-established harmony between sensations 
and the mind. Others imagine that there is a medium 
between sensations and the mind, transforming feelings 
into ideas. Others declare that consciousness is imme- 
diate knowledge of things. Others say that things are 
only ideas, perhaps created in the mind itself, or perhaps 
suggested by some arrangement of inexplicable Nature. 
But is there really any reason why our bodies, which are 
the assistants of our joys, the mediums of our self-display, 
and the instruments of our great performances, should 
be in the courts of Philosophy scouted vagabonds? 

When we observe and consider the intellectual acts 
and the noblest conceptions of Reason, and we ask how 
they arise in human minds, we are directed away from 
the trickery of logic, which only turns a ka ] eidoscope 



30 ELEMENTS OF TERSON 

of words, and plays with the ins and outs of phrases, 
and we discover in a human person powers and func- 
tions exalted and glorious. As we survey 

Faculties . . . f ° , J 

and acts of each of these, we observe that they are not 
the personal on i y helps to our highest wisdom, but each 

mind. , , 

is the essential, and almost the beginning, of 
all intelligence; and, without each of them, men would 
be idiots, and truth unknowable. 

Foremost among these faculties is that which we call 
Attention. It is Directed consciousness. It is con- 
sciousness knowing itself as an activity, and 

Attention. ... ° _ . . J ' 

controlling itself. It is consciousness gov- 
erning its own direction, quickness, grasp and tenacity. 
It is not merely an occasional exercise of the mind, but 
is ever active in the waking man. It is the faculty that 
opens the doors of the treasury of the mind and com- 
mands a delivery of its affluence. And if Man is to know 
himself in consciousness, it is attention which is to make 
the study with spiritual scalpels and lenses, and is to 
count the respirations, pulses and vibrations of the soul. 

Next we notice in human intelligence something that 
all persons observe as being curious, and that logicians 
A . . and philosophers speculate about, but which, 
of ideas. as a study, is a part of psychology, and is of 

Memory. utmost importance. We observe that ideas 
have a connection together, a connection by classifica- 
tion, and a persistent union in our minds. This is not 
merely an occasional occurrence, nor a rare phenome- 
non. It is an essential element in all intelligence; and 
just in the measure of its perfect operation Man has wis- 
dom, reason, genius and personal intellectual power. 

Without it intelligence would vanish as it dawns, and 
thought would be no chain, no conception even, but a 



INTELLECT 3 1 

sequence of fugitive unrelated glimpses. The association 
of ideas is thought correlated, adjusted to its relations 
with other thoughts and with the personal life of the 
thinker, and then reeled up in the Being that is behind 
and below consciousness. It is the persistence of mental 
life, bearing constant evidence of the under working of 
a persistent living personality. It stores away thoughts 
with a history of their origin in circumstances, and also 
with intelligence of their likenesses, connections and 
relativities; and therefore when the thoughts mount 
again into consciousness they come in linked chains, or 
broad pictures, or in troops. Sometimes it seems to be 
a Master of our thoughts; but it is so only as a man's 
past always dominates his present. 

This association of ideas is not essentially different in 
the greater conceptions in our minds from what it is in 
our lesser experiences; for it is not a connection of imper- 
sonal reason, but is a connection of each thought with 
the Being of the man himself. He is the link and tie of 
ideas, and they are the witnesses to his existence. And 
the measure of their quantity and quality is the measure 
of the mental nobility of the man. The persistent con- 
nection of thoughts, and the power of giving attention to 
parts of that connection, are the two phases of memory; 
and memory is the sine qua non of personal nobility, and 
makes both the present and the past experiences of a 
soul a persistent wealth. Woe to him if it is only a per- 
sistence of separate sights and sounds and touches, and 
not a correlation of ideas which The Creator has designed 
for eternal union. 

Next there come into our notice two faculties and 
functions of mind, which work with the attention and 
the memory to perfect their work. One is a faculty of 



32 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

making in the mind such symbols and representatives 
of knowledge, that ideas remain when the things and 
experiences are forgotten. It makes words 
™boLSig and language, art and harmonies, logic and 
Faculty of its premises. It raises a soul out of its sor- 
ideas atng ^ anc * S ross associations into the intellec- 
tual and spiritual life. The other is a faculty 
of multiplying attention and memory and association of 
ideas, and of correlating the many experiences and the 
plural ideas of the intellect, so that out of them come 
ideas of ideas, and principles of principles. These two 
personal faculties exalt the man from the condition of a 
mere receiver of impressions into that of a Being to 
whom great principles of Nature, and wide-reaching 
purposes and ideas of The Creator are revealed. 

After we have recognized that grand personal powers 
and actions in men are the means which furnish an ines- 
ideasof timable wealth of intelligence to them, we 

time, space, find that we have in them an explanation of 
Turaiit^ a l ar g e g rou P of conceptions which are al- 
division, ways present in our ideas and experiences, 

lmension. an( j w j t jj 0U |. wn ich there can be neither ex- 
perience nor thought. And yet these ideas are unsolved 
puzzles in every philosophy which rests more on logic 
and analysis of objective thought than on recognition of 
the nature of consciousness and on the personal active 
functions of men. These conceptions are our ideas of 
quantity, time and space, which Aristotle classed as catego- 
ries, and Kant called a priori conceptions. A rational 
examination of them will show that they are products of 
personal actions and experience, and that, in a greater 
measure than any other conceptions, they are assisted 



INTELLECT 33 

by, and dependent on, that human body which so many 
rationalists disparage. 

Kant specially mentioned as a priori conceptions the 
principles of mathematics, and the categories time and 
space. He could not have selected any that are more 
evidently physical and experimental; for, all the proc- 
esses of mathematics are either mere variations of meth- 
ods of counting, or mere equivalent definitions. Kant 
often cites, as a priori conceptions, the fact that 5-4-2 = 7, 
and the fact that two sides of an angle, or two parallel 
lines, cannot enclose space. But, in fact, no sum in 
addition, nor any multiplication table, was ever learned 
by anybody except through counting or memory of hear- 
say. And that "Angles and parallels do not enclose 
space," is only an equivalent definition of angles and 
parallels; for "enclose" means "surround by continu- 
ous lines," and angles and parallels are not continuous 
lines. 

If we scrutinize our perceptions of things, we soon 
perceive a consciousness of directed attention; or, in 
other words, a consciousness of direction of 
our Self, and that this directed consciousness 
fixes itself on various points of the observed objects, and 
that we perceive these points in their relations to each 
other and to our Self, and that we perceive our Self, or 
are conscious of our Self, in relations to them. And this 
is Space, a consciousness of measurable reach of direc- 
tion of our Self, in respect to attention and perception. 
This is the simplest aspect of the conception of space. 
But we are, in our bodies, constantly conscious of per- 
ception of different objects, or different impacts, at dif- 
ferent parts of our organism, or at different angles 



34 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

from our center of personal consciousness. These rela- 
tions and separations of parts of objects, we learn to 
measure only by experience; and this experience is 
gained in its first steps by some sense of measure, exten- 
sion, or reach, in our own person, or by some sense of 
time occupied in the process of measuring. Space is 
therefore a conception of plurality in the relations of 
physical objects to each other and to our Self, and is 
measured by our consciousness of different parts of our 
own physical organism, or by the angles and reach of 
directed attention, or by time. 

If we scrutinize further our self-consciousness, we per- 
ceive always a consciousness of self-continuance, gauged 
or measured by something that is in con- 
sciousness itself, and inseparable from it. 
This is time; or, in other words, time is consciousness of 
continuance of our Self. This, by experience, assisted 
by our personal power of making general conceptions 
and symbols, and of perpetuating them by memory 
as laws of our thought, becomes a general conception 
of time, applicable in all our experiences, and in all 
conceptions of actions or events. Who shall say that it 
may not be a regulated vibration or oscillation of our 
personal being? Science has demonstrated that all the 
so-called qualities and accidents of matter are meas- 
urable motions of particles, and Science is demonstrating 
that the vital functions of our bodies are performed in 
pulses or vibrations. There are in our physical life, 
direct and reflex action, flux and reflux, stroke and relax- 
ation, which in our health compromise and harmonize 
with each other, but by their conflicts produce disease, 
dementia and death. Analogy of Science may indicate 
that there is a pulse and vibration of the soul, or of that 



INTELLECT 35 

subtlest, most hidden part of our physical being, at which 
mind seizes matter, and takes control. Time is primarily 
a consciousness of successive exercises of vital action. 
Secondarily, it is a consciousness that the oscillation of 
our attention is associated with a sequence in the vital 
experiences of our bodies, and in the activities of the 
material world. 

The discussions in the preceding pages have been 
steadily illustrating and confirming, on many lines of 
survey, our doctrines that personal conscious- c 
ness is an activity, and is of plural facts, con- ness is 
nected with one another. Pursuing the study pluraL 
of intellect further, we are brought, by both logic and self- 
examination, to a perception that consciousness is itself 
plural, and that in this truth there is a conductive phi- 
losophy reliable and glorious, a philosophy of personal 
being. 

It has been the popular fashion to declare that con- 
sciousness is an unit, and that it cannot be consciousness 
of anything but just being, or Self, and that all the rest 
of our wisdom is uncertain and unreliable. Against such 
doctrine, derived from inferences from false premises, we 
affirm that consciousness is multiplex or plural, and that 
this fact is the reason why philosophers have recognized 
quantity, quality, modality and relation as necessary cate- 
gories of knowledge. 

In one aspect consciousness is single. It is conscious- 
ness of the unity of its possessor. This is the last van- 
ishing glimpse of Self as seen by One's Self, single con 
Really this unity or singleness is a result of sciousness. 
confining One's Self to a single viewing-point. It is see- 
ing One's Self through only one window. 

Philosophers have felt compelled to find assurance of 



36 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

the reality of existence or life. They have thought to 
find it by tricks with the verb to be, and they have made 
infinitives and nouns and participles out of it, as if it 
meant something, and yet, all the time there was no idea 
in it; for to be is not really a verb. It is only a copula. 
It is only an equation mark of equality, like =. Hence 
the Greeks were so confused in their words that they 
named the first category sometimes being, ousia (really 
this is essence or substance), and sometimes quantity. But 
almost all the world has approved Aristotle's dictum 
11 Unity {to /ien) is entity " (to on). In one view of the 
matter they were right ; for consciousness of quantity is, in 
its beginning, a person's consciousness of his own being, 
his independence, oneness, selfhood and wholeness. 

But no experience of a person's consciousness ever 
was, or ever can be, single. A person is always con- 
scious, not only that he exists, but that he is 
Double con- f certain sort and that his « suc hness," or 

sciousness. ' ' 

quality, consists in faculties for activity. He 
knows that he is, but more than that, he knows that he 
has something, and that which he has he knows only as 
powers of action. 

But, no person ever had a thought that was not about 
some action, real or imaginary. The knowledge of the 

outer world begins, for all persons, in the 
So^ness third cate g orv of the person's Self; that is 

to say, in his exercise of his faculties; and this 
is his category of modality. Hence quantity of substance 
is, in our knowledge of it, a perception of many contacts 
that the person has with its many parts (or atoms), which 
are joined in oneness by the intelligent faculties of the 
person. He looks at himself, when he wishes to, through 
a single window, and finds his selfhood, but he always 



INTELLECT 37 

looks at other things, and often at himself, through 
many windows, and he discovers himself by his many 
doings. 

In this triplicity of consciousness arises that concep- 
tion which is the chief principle of philosophy, the 
central fact in all the system of truths, the 
basis of all reasoning. This fact or principle cau e sati on° 
is named Causation. In every perception we 
are conscious that something does something. Philoso- 
phers have recognized a great importance in the idea of 
"Cause and effect." It has been discussed as a law, and 
as a deduced conception, and as a formula of an equa- 
tion : but, in fact, it is the simple truth that " Doing 
does," although in philosophy there is no greater fact. 

All life of intelligent persons gets its constant illumi- 
nation from exercise in the consciousness of causation. 
We act, or do, to ourselves, moving and receiving motion. 
We are at both ends of these acts, and know cause and 
effect as one action in ourselves. 

We may now proceed to say further that every con- 
ception in consciousness is so far plural that it is at 
least quadruple. In every perception of things, 0uadru le 
the knower knows the thing as doing some- conscious- 
thing, both to the perceiver and to other ness " 
things. That is to say, he knows it in its relations. He 
knows it as a cause actively related, or connected, with 
many other things. By this knowledge, the man comes 
up into all the wealth and splendor of mental endowment. 
Here he finds the affluent material of his logic. He, 
in every one of his conceptions, knows himself as 
being, as having faculties, as using those faculties, 
and as correlating the relations (or relativities) of per- 
ceived things, until he sees widened out an universe 



38 11 EMENTS OF PERSON 

of conceptions and principles glorious beyond measure. 
In the quadruple consciousness, the single perceptions 
become multiplex conceptions, and the individual facts 
become the interwoven systematization of a magnificent 
universe. And in this conceived universe there are prin- 
ciples of principles, and generalized facts of facts; but 
not one of these is an inferential product of Logic, or a 
creation of Reason; for man knows nothing that has not 
been brought to his consciousness by the relation of his 
trebly conscious person to the multiplex relations of 
the concrete things, or the events, or the living beings of 
the world. In the quadruple consciousness, sound 
ennobles itself into music; and lines and surfaces become 
the beauties of painting and sculpture and architecture; 
the activities of matter develop into the grandeur and 
ministrations of Science and Art: and causation expands 
into conceptions of possession, ownership, rights, skill 
and moral law. 

That which the quadruple consciousness of a man 
knows, constitutes his grand endowments and wealth. 
This raises him above the brutes. This ushers him, a 
Prince, into an universe which ever unfolds to him new 
glories, and invites him into an inexhaustible field of 
ministering resources. And this unmeasurable treasure 
is not a creation of the Reason of men; but has come to 
them in their perception of the relations in the facts, 
beings, and activities of the world. Are we humiliated 
by this? Not unless it is a shame to be second to The 
Creator. If we were the makers of the grandest concep- 
tions, then the facts of the universe would also be imagi- 
nary and its things unreal. 

We must note here, that probably the loftiest concep- 
tion that arises in the human mind is, at least as to its 



INTELLECT 39 

chief element, a conception of purpose. Even brutes 
know themselves as doers, and know their wishes and 
aims; but the} r probably know these as indi- 
vidual aims to exercise instinctive activities. ^p* 6 ^ 
But man, in his quadruple consciousness, 
knows himself as aiming at intelligent action, and knows 
intelligent action as purpose: for this is the definition of 
purpose, just this and no more. Intelligent action is 
directed aim. It is the personality and will of intelligent 
Person acting. It is not an inductive conception, a cre- 
ation by thought; but is a consciousness of what intelli- 
gent action, in relation to things and circumstances, is. 
Aimless action is idiocy or insanity. Intelligent action, 
known in consciousness as purpose or aim, is the crown- 
ing glory of the splendor of personal being in men or 
Gods, and, as we shall observe further on, is the core 
and essence of that consummate excellence in personal 
beings to which we give the name Morality. 

In what we have said of quadruple consciousness, we 
have used the language of philosophy, but we have only 

interpreted the thoughts and consciousness of 

,, ™ , Skill, 

all men. The common sense, or general wisdom, 

consciousness of normal men, fairly devel- Common 

1 . r 1 1 , sense. 

oped, is an acceptance of truths that have 
been brought to us in facts. Wisdom is not invented 
conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is 
humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that 
are found in things. What are skill, and science, and 
art, but submission to the truth which The Creator 
brings, in things, within the compass and vision of the 
mind, that is to say, into the quadruple consciousness of 
a man? After all our boasting about our Reason, our 
progress, our inventions and conceptions, we find our 



40 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

glory and our happiness in our conformity to the laws 

and facts that are in things, as we discover these laws 

and facts, not in ourselves alone, but in 

Obedience. . 

Nature as relative to ourselves. This is obedi- 
ence to The Creator; and perfect obedience is consum- 
mate wisdom and complete virtue. 

We might now attempt here to write in a schedule of 
categories, a scientific and philosophical portrayal of the 

powers, blessedness, and glory that inhere in 
Multiple con- h personality f a human being. But the 

sciousness. tr j r> 

plural consciousness brings forward so vast an 
array of intelligence, and displays such a system of the 
relations of men to things, and of each man to all men, 
and of principles to principles, that we must linger in 
contemplation of some of these facts and principles. 

The plural consciousness finds its greatness and glory 
in the fact that it makes intellect itself the subject of its 
study. The lesser animals can, like men, have conscious- 
ness of being, and of having powers, and of using facul- 
ties, and of perceiving some of the relations of things. 
But a man can make his Self, and all the stored treasures 
of his complex being, the object of his reflections. 



§3. MORAL SCIENCE 

Chief among all these glories that are in men, or that 

come to them, through the consciousness of the affluent 

wealth in the endowments of Man's personal 

being, and through the performances of his 

personal powers, and through his perception 

of the facts and principles of the countless relations in 

the things and activities of the world, is that one which, 

as a philosophy of the well-being of Man, and of the 



MORAL SCIENCE 4 1 

highest happiness of human persons, and of the direct- 
ing aims and the motive springs of action in human 
lives, is called Moral Science. 

Nothing in the realm of human conceptions is 
accorded more unanimous and enthusiastic eulogy than 
theoretical morality. About nothing is there more com- 
plete consensus of opinion than there is about the gen- 
eral principles of practical morality. But when we look 
for agreement among men in the application of these 
principles, or for a prevalent regard for that part of 
moral science which relates to what we call right and 
wrong, or when we attempt the study of the fundamental 
principles of morals, the unanimity breaks up like the 
surface of water under a wind, and the ideas which as 
theories are adored, are in practice despised and hated. 

Moral Science is not a system of religion, nor of vir- 
tue, in any narrow sense. It is the whole broad system 
of all that is highest and wisest in wisdom, all that is 
noblest in performance, and all that enters into the hap- 
piness or the misery of men. It is the science of the 
perfection of the human person, not only in all those 
elements of physical and mental life which we have 
enumerated, but also in many more which rise far above 
them in the plane of excellence, and indeed fill the 
whole horizon of that field in which are the forces and 
values of personal being. This field is so vast that for 
the purposes of this little book, as a study of the philoso- 
phy of human personality, we must content ourselves 
with a contemplation of the essential and fundamental 
principles that come to us in the crowded intelligence, 
or plural consciousness, of men. 

In our survey of the conceptions which arise in human 
minds, and are correlated and joined in our plural con- 



4^ ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

sciousness, we found three which are always present in 
a person awake and sane, and are connected with almost 

every thought. These three conceptions are 
cetionsSf 1 " °^ Gausa ^ on > purpose, and obedience. When 
causation, these three conceptions are viewed in their 
obIdie S nce nd relations » and in the conclusions to which 

they conduct us, there opens to us a magnifi- 
cent prospect of the splendor and wealth of human per- 
sonality, and of the possible destiny of men. 

The consciousness of causation, beginning in our 
knowing ourselves as causes, or causers, then becoming 

a perception that all knowledge is of activities, 

Causation. _ fl . , 

and that all action is causation, and that causa- 
tion is inherent in all existence and all vitality, is the 
basis and the constructive principle in Moral Science. 

In the consciousness of causation there inheres, or is 
born, the idea of ownership, an idea dominant and 
T , . blessed in all the lines of human life, and 

Idea of ' 

ownership or furnishing the impulses to all the ardor of 
"ghts. human pursuits. The consciousness of causa- 

tion is a feeling that the caused thing is forever joined 
to its cause. An entire separation of an effect and its 
cause is inconceivable. There is a connection of rela- 
tion that is eternal. The idea that you own your crea- 
tions, and that in them you have added to the sum of 
your own possessions, becomes the first element of the 
idea of what we call Rights. Then the spirit of the 
man inflates with a sense of the Tightness of self-defense, 
and with a sense that an assault on his ownership is an 
attack on the nobility, and on the value, of life itself. 
And so, from very childhood, the consciousness of acting 
becomes a beginning of the sense of exaltation and dig- 
nity inhering in the ideas that we call Rights and Jus- 



MORAL SCIENCE 43 

tice. These ideas of ownership, rights and justice, 
become in us general principles that spread a halo of 
what we call " Sacredness," over all the relations of 
Society, and that become on one side a passion of asser- 
tion of ownership, and on the other an equal authority 
of restraint. But each single perception of rights or 
justice is a recognition of ownership based either on 
some causing action of the owner, or on some rights 
imparted and transferred by the first causer of the right. 
Viewed from another point, the idea of causation 
appears inseparably joined to a perception that all intel- 
ligent action is a movement towards the pro- 

. . • i • i Ideas of 

duction or causing of something. In other purpose, 
words, intelligent action is purpose. This value, ends, 

and quality. 

idea of purpose is interpreted and illustrated 
to us by all our consciousness of our own nature, by all 
our wants, by all our passion for self-expression. It 
becomes a sense of value, or rather, it is a sense of the 
value of the ends not yet grasped. A person cannot 
conceive of himself as not, at every moment and in 
every action, pursuing ends that have value to his living 
being. This sense of value is the sense of what we call 
quality. It never comes to us except in a perception of 
the way in which the ends of things or of actions express 
the purposes of living persons, or bear on the welfare of 
living beings. 

The combined conceptions of causation, ends, pur- 
poses and values, so pervade all our conscious- 
ness of our life and of the relations of things, Fi rst°cause 
that they become a perception that we are of men and 
free actors, pursuing with intelligence valu- Sy ^ t ^ r ' 
able ends. It develops also into a conception 
and conviction that the same principles prevail every- 



44 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

where, and that we are ourselves parts of a system that 
has one First Cause; and that, in this system of things, 
its Cause, or Creator, has the rights of ownership that 
are inherent in causation, and is pursuing, with intelli- 
gence, ends that to him have value, or quality and excel- 
lence. It becomes a conception and conviction that the 
Cause of the Universe has the right to obtain the ends 
or values for which he has created the World. In this 
conception The Creator does not stand before our minds 
as a power, but only as The Cause of a universe, which 
in many respects and relations can never be separated 
from him, and in which he has a right to attain his ends 
and values. 

Later this conception of The Creator's rights may be 

reinforced and illuminated by our perception of the 

value of the ends pursued by The Creator, 

Ideas of J ^ \ / . , , 

moral right, an d by our personal sympathy with the ex- 
duty, obiiga- cellence of those ends; but the conscious- 
ness of the ownership that inheres in causa- 
tion is itself the foundation and authority of what we 
call the law of Tightness in the universe, or Moral Law. 
The Nature which The Cause of an Universe incorpo- 
rates into it, cannot be anything but right, no matter 
what it may be ; for there is no other standard of right 
practicable or conceivable. If The Creator had pur- 
posed and caused an Universe very different, in its things 
and forces and operations, from this one in which we 
live, it would have settled itself into a system, would 
have worked out its ends, and would have evolved a 
harmony in its activities, or at least a peace in which the 
forces intended for mastership would exercise the con- 
trol designed for them, and this mastership would be 
their right, because, at the last, it is the right of The 



MORAL SCIENCE 45 

First Cause. Then, because every idea that a man has, 
except those of consciousness of his Self, comes to him 
in the perception of the relations of concrete things, 
these master forces of the Universe, but especially those 
that are masterful in the social and political life of per- 
sonal beings, become to men as voices that declare the 
ends, or values and purposes, which The Cause has 
ordained, and which, therefore, are The Creator's rights. 
Then, when a free-willed person, like a man, in whom 
the ends of The Creator can be reached only by his vol- 
untary conformity to the purposes and methods of his 
Cause, inwrought in Nature, sees the designed ends of 
creation and of life, as having value in the system of be- 
ing, and as part of the rights of the Cause of himself 
and Nature, his consciousness responds with those con- 
ceptions which we call Duty and Obligation. Then he 
makes the verbs "I ought," "You ought," and the word 
ought means to him the authority and rights of The 
Creator as The First Cause. Books innumerable — books 
eloquent and forceful, books that are magnificent de- 
fenses of virtue and right and excellence — have been 
written to maintain that the first principle in moral 
science is the immediate consciousness of obligation, 
and that the conception which forces us to say ought is 
intuitive, primal, and unexplainable. That it is imme- 
diate in consciousness is true, but it is not there as an 
abstract idea. Life and experience are made up of indi- 
vidual momentary activities and relations, which teach 
to us the principles that they illustrate, and in each of 
these facts and relations where the sense of obligation is 
present, the consciousness is a sense of the rights which 
inhere in the ownership of The Cause. Moral law, 
right, duty, are words that would have no meaning, or 



46 Kl EMENTS OF TERSON 

rather could never arise, in an Universe that had no sin- 
gle, or universal, intelligent Cause or Creator. In a 
system that has an intelligent Cause they are words au- 
thoritative and inflexible. The system, however, which 
our Creator has instituted, is so immense in its provision 
for human good and happiness, and so affluent in excel- 
lences, that it adds to our conception of The Creator'scon- 
trol of his rights another conception of beauties, harmo- 
nies and beneficence; so that, in our plural consciousness, 
our conception of moral law is a conception of an infinite 
righteousness exercising everywhere an authority that 
aims at universal bliss in harmony. 

In this Universe, a human Person knows himself as 
a part of both the means and the ends of The Creator, 
and then with consciousness of his own freeness, and 
with a sense of the value or quality of his own being as 
compared with The Creator's design, he cherishes in 
himself a conception of duty that explains and glorifies 
itself, and glorifies its possessor as being very near to 
The Creator. 

We must believe that there is no such thing as value, 
or right, or moral law, except in personal beings, and 
in their relations to their Cause and to each other. In 
physical Nature all things are of equal value and Tight- 
ness; and nothing can be wrong. In the relations of 
men to each other, and to their common Cause, every- 
thing is a moral relation, because it has a relation to the 
ends designed by The Creator for personal beings. 
These moral relations are of three classes, and include, 
first, everything that a person does to himself as affecting 
what The Creator designs him to be or to do; second, 
what the person does or gives to his Creator in recogni- 



MORAL SCIENCE 47 

tion, worship or service; and, third, what the person does 
to or for other persons. 

Moral duty calls first to sanctity of the body. It pre- 
sents an ideal of normal health and action. It suggests 
purity and chastity and a loathing of self-degradation. 
It raises and expands the sense of self-value and per- 
sonal honor, as a Child of God, till it becomes a dignity, 
and a passion of self-defense, that abhors ignorance and 
self-deception, and scorns a lie, and loathes a breach of 
trust. Then it glows with a sense of the value of great 
thoughts, noble sentiments, pure loves, and earnest Will, 
all measured by a divine conception, which has not 
grown out of mere experience, nor had its origin in the 
soil or on Earth. 

Secondly, the Moral Consciousness erects a concep- 
tion of the nature, character, purposes, beneficence and 
Tightness of The Cause of the Universe, until ideas of 
his Will fill the soul as a presence of a holy law. It 
expands until the soul glows with a sense that obedience 
to the Author of life is self-exaltation, and that praise, 
adoration and service belong of right to The Creator 
from men. 

Thirdly, the Moral Consciousness, instinctive with a 
sense of the value of The Creator's purposes for the 
whole host of his children, asserts its authority in all the 
broad field of political and social science. It draws 
together the family, and gives all the significance there 
is in the names, Parent, Husband, Wife, Son, Daughter, 
Brother and Sister. Then it broadens its compass, till 
it engenders and illuminates the conceptions of neigh- 
borism, of race, of nation, of the solidarity of Society, 
and finally of that love, justice and ministry which are 



48 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

comprehended under the name u Enthusiasm of human- 
ity." 

We are sorely tempted to linger here for a disquisition 
on the rights of men; but we must content ourselves with 
a recognition of the general principles. 

In its first bearings, the Will and purpose 
of The Cause of the Universe relate to the 
individual person. He stands in some relations to his 
Creator as if no other soul existed on the Earth. The 
Divine Will has made him, and has endowed him with 
capacities, and needs, and ends, and duties. So far as 
these are contained in, or related to, the soul's senti- 
ments and acts towards his Creator, that is to say his 
beliefs, his loves, his obedience, his private worship, the 
Creator has delegated to no other man or society any 
right of control or interference by force. And the Cre- 
ator has given him a home on the Earth, and a share in 
its stores and resources. Somewhere, somehow, as long 
as his life continues, he has the right of home and of sus- 
tenance, and a right of ownership in what he produces. 

But the Creator has made a host of persons, all of 
them objects of his love and ministry, and subjects of his 
moral law. Hence the stores and resources of the world 
must be partitioned and shared. More than this: The 
Creator has made Society to be more serving than 
served. The stores and resources of the world are much 
more in Society than in Nature. The accumulated wis- 
dom, experience, philosophy, science and inventions of 
the men of the past, gathered into history, literature, 
culture, arts and civilization, are the world into which 
the man is born a citizen, on which he may justly make 
demands for justice, protection and love, for good laws, 
education and help; and which gives to him, even at its 



MORAL SCIENCE 49 

worst, almost all that he has, and more than he can 
repay. If he makes discoveries or inventions, or new 
ideas, or wealth, he has done it with what the past men 
have supplied to him. They have pushed him forward a 
thousand steps before he made the final one. Hence 
his right of ownership of even his own productions has 
some limits, and he owes more than he ever pays. 

Duties and rights are joined together. Ideal Society 
is incarnate reciprocity. This fact is the inspiration of 
patriotism. It gives meaning to words like country, 
nation j fatherland, that have analogies with the meaning 
of home, and even with the fatherhood of God. The 
words justice and love would have no meaning if there 
had been no divine constitution of Society. And these 
two words are woven together as one. Blessed is the 
world only because the Creator has not left its system to 
evolve itself merely through the passions of men, nor 
under the guidance of intellect alone; but has made 
moral forces and ideas persuasive and dominant, and 
has established as moral agencies the consciousness of 
his purposes and values and Will, with the sympathies 
and forces of love like his own. 

To the moral consciousness, there has, in English, 
perhaps unfortunately, been given the special name con- 
science, which is the French name for both 

. Conscience. 

consciousness and conscience, and is derived 
from the Latin conscientia, which also has the double 
meaning. The special word conscience has caused most 
harmful misconceptions. It has been considered some- 
thing different from consciousness. It has been regarded 
as a tribunal to which the soul is responsible. It has dis- 
placed The Creator from his judgment throne. Men 
declare themselves justified if they think themselves so. 



50 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

They go further, and say, that they are justified if they 
are conscientious, and sincere in this, even if their sin- 
cerity has only been a cherishing of some notion or 
passion which they have fostered in themselves by gross- 
ness, prejudice, follies and lies. Conscientiousness is not 
conscience, but disposition towards One's conscience. It 
may displace the perception of The Creator's Will and 
ends, and may erect Selfwill into a standard of Tightness; 
and it may become imperious and masterful, just in the 
proportion that it is narrow, ignorant, passionate and 
perverted. 

Conscience cannot be understood, nor set in its right 
position in Moral Science, unless its relation to the sen- 
timents and emotions of personal beings is fully 
issenti- recognized. The ends and Will of The Crea- 

mentai and t or cannot be conceived, nor even believed to 

emotional. . .... 

exist, except as dear to his sentiments, emo- 
tions, loves, or whatever other name we may give to the 
idea of having interest in the lives of personal beings. 
The values, goodness and Tightness of the aims of The 
Creator in human society can only be understood or 
conceived by, or through, sympathy, or fellow feeling, 
with the living experience and happiness and misery 
that teem in the loves, emotions and sympathies of the 
people. Pure intellect cannot compass it, nor even 
touch it. Pure intellect may perceive many of the rela- 
tions of things, or of beings, or of truths; but it makes 
no estimates of worth. It tells facts, but not values. 
The sentimental, or vital, moral consciousness can under- 
stand that there are in men capacities nobler than the 
instinctive, sordid and sensual appetites, and can under- 
stand that The Creator has aimed at the happiness of 
personal beings through their chastity, service, justice, 



MORAL SCIENCE 5 I 

loves and unsensual tastes. Pure intellectual conscious- 
ness takes note of facts and of their relations. It per- 
ceives that they are causes and effects; but it has no con- 
ception of the meaning of the phrase "For the sake of." 
Consciousness could not be moral, moral law would have 
no meaning, and conscience would be unknown, if we 
had no sentimental experience of the worth, good and 
Tightness, that are possible in personal lives, and that 
are the ends aimed at by the Will of The Creator. 

Conscience, or moral consciousness, is then, first, a 
perception of the relation of the lives of personal beings 
to ends designed by The Creator's Will; second, a per- 
ception of the value of these ends, and also a perception 
of valuable ends that are unappreciable by pure intellect; 
third, a consciousness that we ought to stand in personal 
harmony with these ends and aims; fourth, a conscious- 
ness of our actual disposition and performance towards 
The Creator and his aims; fifth, a judgment as to the 
moral quality of dispositions and performances. 

This is not saying that Tightness is utility, or is to be 
gauged by utility. Nothing is, in fact, useful that has 
not been aimed at, to that end, by The Cause of the 
Universe; and righteousness, or virtue, is sympathy with 
the Will of The Creator, and is action for the sake of The 
Creator. 

It follows, from what we have observed, that moral 
consciousness, or conscience, is susceptible of culture 
and perversion. Like all plural conscious- 
ness it depends for its intelligence and cor- c ™^bte 
rectness on the nature and number of the 
facts that it notices, and on the wisdom with which they 
are correlated. As consciousness, its ultimate and fun- 
damental facts are immediate or direct perceptions, and 



52 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

its conception 6t causation, and of the rights involved in 
it, are included in its primal intelligence; but the appli- 
cation of these conceptions, as principles, in the relations 
of living beings, depends on the intelligent observation 
of those relations. 

That the sentimental moral nature can be cultivated 
is the grandest fact in human life, and is one of the 
most precious evidences of the beneficence of The Cre- 
ator. Alas, for the matured person whose tastes and 
sentiments are not purer, richer, and stronger than an 
infant's! 

§4. SOUL, MIND, AND SPIRIT 

In our observation of the nature of a human person, 
we have recognized in him force, intelligence, and senti- 
ment. Each of these is an activity, but they 

Human per- . . 

son is com- are so diverse in their methods, instruments, 
plexor results and productions, that, if consciousness 

did not know them as one unity of person, 
Reason could not conceive them as one life. We are 
compelled to make and use distinct names for these 
three parts of our personality, when we speak of them as 
living or acting. Names are arbitrary inventions for 
our service; but the ideas of which they are symbols 
may give to them enormous importance in philosophy. 
The great never-to-be-forgotten question in this con- 
nection is, What are the vital differences of nature in the 
three elements of personal being? For on the answer to 
this question depends the transcendent question, How, 
and how much, are we higher than the brutes? 

Force, the first form of manifestation of life, is known 
only in connection with a material body and physical 
organs; but neither Consciousness, Reason nor Logic 



SOUL AND MIND 53 

has been able to demonstrate that it is a product of mat- 
ter. The forceful kind of being has quantity, quality, 

modality and relation: and may have them in 

,: . T . ■ Soul - 

great diversity. It may have consciousness, 

selfness and faculties. It may perceive facts, and actions, 
and their effects. It may even correlate some relations 
of things, and perceive some causation, and many adapta- 
tions. But it cannot make abstract ideas, nor principles 
of principles. To this kind of vital being we may give 
the name Soul, and there is no serious objection to giv- 
ing, (as the Greeks did with psyche}, the same name to 
the essence of all living beings. The giving of a com- 
mon name does not imply that all souls have the same 
nature, endowments and destiny. It only implies that 
the highest faculties of the inferior creatures, and the 
lowest faculties of human persons, have some analogies. 
It merely designates a limit, behind which Reason, and 
even Consciousness, cannot explore. It is that part of 
the living being which is forceful, instinctive and auto- 
matic. In using this name we must leave out of view 
any original meaning of the word soul, and its equiva- 
lents, psyche, anima, time, alma, seele, etc. 

For that part of a living being, or that vital energy 
which supplements soul by, if we may so speak, 
handling ideas, abstracting and generaliz- 

, . - , . r Mind. 

ing conceptions, correlating the relations of 
things, formulating truths and principles, and making 
symbols and names for ideas, the word mind is a good 
enough name. The great fact is that this is not an im- 
provement of soul life, but is apparently a distinct, and 
radically different, addition to it. It is something which 
is connected with soul life, but imparts to it a kind of 
life which, in its powers and its sympathies, comes near 



54 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

to that being which is causative, immaterial, and eternal. 
When we come to the contemplation of the third part, 
or kind of human life, we hesitate for a name. A 
satisfactory name, descriptive of either its es- 
sence, form, powers, or quality, seems not 
possible. Hence, naturally, all the names that have 
been given to it have been words that meant breath; be- 
cause air is the least gross of substances, and breathing 
is the subtlest of physical acts. Men have never been 
able, and no one except Plato has ever tried, to conceive 
the personality of the human being as immaterial, pure 
power and character in pure form. We know ourselves 
and others only as bodies, or in bodies; and the life be- 
low consciousness eludes our sight and touch. Hence the 
Hebrews, and even Philo, the most philosophical of Jews, 
thought that spirit was substance. Even now the most 
haughty kinds of philosophy (if we except Agnosticism, 
which is really a negation of philosophy) occupy them- 
selves chiefly with discussions of substance, and con- 
found substance and being. 

The name spirit (and Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma^ 
Latin spiritus, anima and animus) is very faulty, but we 
have no better word available. For ages it has stood 
as a symbol of the highest truth in the consciousness of 
men, alike in their science and their philosophy; for it has 
signified their conviction that men's bodies are but vehi- 
cles of the true Man; that personality is immortal, and 
that character or moral nature inheres only in that part 
of Man which has disposition and sentiment. 

We need a word for a name of that part of a human 
person which is moral. That part is neither the body 
nor the intellect; for acts of bodies take their character 
from the will and sentiments of the person, and intellect 



spirit 55 

is concerned only with ideas, and at its best it is only 
intelligent of facts as known in things. There is a part 
of men which has a sense of divine ends, and has 
sympathies, loves, character, disposition and will, and 
through these knows the value, Tightness, beauty and 
holiness of the divine ends. Therein also are courage 
and its inspirations, and therein are the hates and awful 
passions. Therein is everything that makes the right 
and wrong between men and men, and between a man 
and his Creator. For this part of a man, the word spirit 
may well enough serve as a name, for want of a better. 
And if, using this name, we wrestle with the prob- 
lem of the difference between Man and the ani- 
mals and meaner creatures, and ask how much of 
man is spirit, and how much of mind and soul 
joins with it to make one person, and where the man 
ceases to be animal, perhaps we cannot do better than to 
say, that human consciousness begins at the top. No- 
bility and glory, or passion and perversion, invest the 
triple person made of spirit, mind and soul, and the 
greater question is, not where man leaves the brutes, but 
where human being laps upon the animal, and how 
much of common soul inheres in the nobler being. And 
if there is an ascending scale of words and ideas, and it 
ends at the side of God, why should the subtler and 
nobler consciousness be less believed than the gross 
senses of the cold and coarse or seething flesh? 

In the consciousness of spirit-being there 
is a line of conviction, which may not have „ 1 s ip ' 

J Human 

the authority of a demonstration, but is a spirits, 
strong persuasion, strongest in the best and o{ Q j 6n 
wisest souls. This is the conviction that the 
souls of human persons are in a true sense children 



56 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

of their Creator. When a human spirit interprets to 

itself the depths of meaning that there are in loves, and 

in values of life, and in ends of being, and in purposes, 

and in duty, and right and wrong, it does 

Moral , more, and declares that moral principles, 
argument r r ' 

forimmor- relations, and laws have their essence in a 
t^aiuyof connection of personality. It is an ontolog- 
ical, and not a statutory relation. There can 
be no moral principles between beings that are not of 
one origin and kind, bound together more by vital kin- 
ship than by commands. There is no moral relation 
where there is no solidarity in life. And this principle 
prevails all along the moral line. It reaches upward, as 
well as downward. It seeks the center, as well as the 
surface, of the globe of the universal system. There is no 
moral responsibility where there is no capacity, and there 
is moral capacity only in and by kinship. Morality is 
possible only in mutuality and reciprocity. A being is 
only under the laws of the spiritual system when he is by 
nature a member of that system. Then moral law does 
not exist for any beings who are not in some real sense 
The Creator's children. And if a man is part of the ends 
for which creation exists, and if there is a spirit part of 
his person, existing for the sake of divine quality, then 
the man belongs to the system of spiritual being and 
eternal relations. And as the moral principles reach 
backward to their source, so they reach forward to their 
end or purpose. Moral relativity cannot be conceivably 
compressed into the limits of an earthly life. Conscience 
demands for it a futurity, and philosophy conducts to a 
conviction that moral law is an effect and evidence of a 
life that has no cessation. Conscience has no condemna- 
tions for a being who is not a free personality in the vital 



CATEGORIES 57 

system of moral relations, and returnable as a spirit 
to its laws of mutuality and reciprocity, and its loves. 

This moral argument for immortality is the verdict of 
true psychology, and the climax of the philosophy which 
we may call conductive. It is the cry of conscience 
against that pantheism, and that monism, which pretend 
that, if there is spirit, there is but one universal sub- 
stance. Universal, intelligent, impersonal spirit is either 
gross matter or universal emptiness. It is an unmean- 
ing phrase. The pantheism that means universal iden- 
tity, or impersonal unity, can have no relativities, no sys- 
tematization, no moralities. Only such pantheism as 
there may be in a system of the relations of individual 
free personal spirits can be moral, or philosophically 
conceivable, or have the applause of conscience. This is 
replete with life and glory, and with assurance of endless 
personal vitality. There is an ascending scale of words 
and of ideas, and it ends at the side of God.* Loves, 
right, will, spirit, Child of God — these are as steps of the 
staircase rising to the better world. " Glory to God in 
the highest places, and on Earth peace! Good will 
towards men! " is only heard and understood by human 
spirits because it is the language of the family, and 
because the human spirit can respond, " Hallowed be Thy 
name, Our Father." 

§ 5. DESCRIPTION OF MAN IN CATEGORIES 

If, in the preceding discussions, we have been true to 
facts, we ought now to be able, scientifically, logically 
and philosophically, to describe in outline, by exact 

♦In this discussion we have, as far as possible, omitted discussion of the 
personality of The Creator, and of moral responsibility, guilt, punishment, 
and their related topics. The consideration of these comes in its logical 
place in later chapters. 



58 ELEMENTS OF PERSON 

categories (i. e., predicables), our knowledge of men's 
person as it begins in consciousness and evolves into all 
the glory of moral life. A schedule of categories may 
reasonably be demanded of us by those readers to whom 
the discussions shall seem faulty. "The Personal Equa- 
tion " must be formulated, in order that it may be 
defended, and that Psychology may become a science. 

A few further explanations of principles and methods 
must precede the schedule. 

i. The words quantity, quality, modality and relation 
must be recognized as naturally serviceable names for 
the kinds of conceptions in which we may be known to 
ourselves or to others. 

2. In a person's self-consciousness his knowledge of 
himself will not be a comparative measure, but will be 
his fundamental being. His quantity will be his unity, 
and will be the same as identity, independence, totality, 
selfness, or whatever else we may call his personal one- 
ness, when we observe it from different points of view. 
But while self-consciousness is knowledge of individu- 
ality, it is not an abstract notion of oneness; for personal 
identity is complex, organic and vital. 

3. A schedule conforming to self-consciousness must 
put relativity after modality. 

4. In a complete table of the categories of personal 
being, there must be three schedules, the first contain- 
ing the predicables of psychical, or vital, being, the sec- 
ond containing the predicables of the faculties that are 
concerned with the relations which are correlated in 
knowledge by the intellect, and the third description of 
the relations of a Person with his Creator. 

Inasmuch as intellect is a certain quality of the per- 
sonality, and in its activities it deals with, and exhibits, 



CATEGORIES 59 

an advanced range of conceptions, by correlating the 
simple perceptions known in the psychical life, it follows 
that intellectual quantity includes vital quality, intel- 
lectual quality includes vital modality, and intellectual 
modality includes vital relativity. And, inasmuch as 
what we may call Moral Life is a certain modality and 
relation of the intellectual life, and exhibits an advanced 
range of correlated conceptions based on those of the 
intellectual life, it follows that in the third schedule 
there must be observed a similar precession, so that 
moral quantity, quality and modality include, respec- 
tively, intellectual quality, modality and relation. 

5. The verbs which help to describe personal being 
must not be the verb to be only but the verbs have, 
exercise, and correlate. 

6. We can profitably use some suggestions of Kant, 
in his discussion of what he calls " The Principles of 
The Pure Understanding." These he classi- 

r . Kant's 

neS aS: Principles of 

I. Axioms Of Intuition. the Pure 

II. Anticipations of Perception. Understand- 

Ill. Analogies of Experience. 
IV. Postulates of Empirical Thought in general. 

These are the four classes of the conceptions that are 
in consciousness; that is to say, they are the forms of the 
intelligence of a self-conscious and rational person; and 
while they could have no place in a philosophy of pure 
reason, they take a great importance in a conductive 
philosophy based on self-consciousness; for they are, in 
fact, quantity, quality, modality and relatiofi as known in 
consciousness. The second and third items may better, 
perhaps, be named Adaptations to Relations, and Adapta- 
tions to Experience. 



6o 



ELEMENTS OF PERSON 



CATEGORIES OF a human person (as in consciousness). 



OF STRUCTURAL HEING. 



Of Quantity* 

Tin y ake "Axioms of In- 
tuition." Their Verb 
is, "I Am." 

Inherent, Introherent, 
Self, JSubsistent, Existent, 
Real, Identical (One, To- 
tal), Free, Complex, Fi- 
nite, V\'hole, Vital, Pro- 
pulsive, Organic, Con- 
scious, Sensitive. 



Of Quality. 

They are Adaptations to Re- 
lations. Their Verb is, 
"I Have." 

Consciousness, Senses, 
Selfhood, Power, Energy, 
Selfness, Nature, Disposi- 
tion, Affinities, Coherence, 
Continuity, Reach, Needs, 
Receptivity, Aggressiveness, 
ness, Form, Constitution, 
Conservatism. 



u -~ The categories of Vital 
J3 =j Quantity. The categories 
§ o of Vital Quality (the lat- 
c = ter converted into their 
g *± nouns or adjectives). 



The categories of Vital 
Modality. Experience (Hab- 
its, Education, Bias, Preju- 
dices). 

./Esthetic association of 
ideas. 



o 
^ _• 

O 3 



The categories of Vital 
and Intellectual Quantity 
and Quality (as adjec- 
tives). 

Consciousness of value 
(i. e., ends). 

Associated ideas of 
personal relation. 

Will, Loves. 



The categories of Intel- 
lectual Modality. Conscience 
of comparison with normal 
personality and the Will of 
The Creator. 

Sense of self-value, or ex- 
cellence. Impulses to optim- 
ism in Self (Tightness, chas- 
tity, purity, worth, honor, 
nobility, integrity, conti- 
nence, and self-employment). 



CATEGORIES 



61 



categories of a human person (as in consciousness). 



OF ACTIVE BEING. 



Of Modality 



They are Adaptations to Ex- 
perience. Their Verb is, 
"I Exercise." 

Attention (Alertness, Con- 
centration). Self-expression. 
Address, Direction. Asso- 
ciation of ideas, Memory. 
Instinct, Hope, Fear. In- 
tention, Force, Causation. 
Sensation. 



Of Relativity. 

They afe "Postulates of Em- 
pirical Thought." Their 
Verb is, "I Perceive 
in Correlation." 

Impact, Contact, Affinity 
Pleasure, Pain, Danger. Se- 
quence, Time, Space, Motion, 
Extension, Divisibility, Plu- 
rality, Shape. Assistance, 
Resistance, Combination, Ef- 
fect, Possession, Sense-per- 
ception, Tone, Color. 



Categories of Vital Rela- 
tivity. Invention (Symbol- 
ization, Language), Qualita- 
tion ( Abstraction ^Contempla- 
tion, Reflection, ^Esthetic 
Taste. 



Causation and Effect, Own- 
ership, Personality, Enumer- 
ation, Mathematics, Value, 
Generalization, Logic, Judg- 
ment, Science, Philosophy, 
Reason, Harmony, Beauty, 
Music. Art. 



Categories of Intellectual 
Relativity. Conscience as to 
duties to the Creator, in re- 
spect of Tightness, or excel- 
lence in Sentiments (love, 
reverence, gratitude); Obedi- 
ence (lovalty, service, humil- 
ity); Faith "(in his Will and 
Word) ; Worship (recognition, 
adoration, prayer, praise, 
thanks, penitence). 



Conscience as to duties to 
Society because of relation 
to the Creator, in respect of 
value (or Tightness) in Truth- 
fulness, Fidelity, Justice, 
Love, Family sentiments and 
acts, Friendship. Altruism, 
Solidarity, Socialism, Philan- 
thropy, Kindness, Liberality, 
Patriotism, Neighborism, 
Statesmanship, Government, 
Punishment, War, Protection 
and Service, Education, Be- 
neficence, Influence for vir- 
tue, " Enthusiasm of human- 
ity," Influence for God and 
religion. 



CHAPTER V 

THE DIVINE PERSON 
§ I. A PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL ARGUMENT 

In the preceding survey of the personal nature, powers, 
and destiny of our Self, we have, at several points, seen 
that our philosophy includes, and depends on, the exist- 
ence and actions of a personal First Cause of all things. 
This, however, is only like opening the door of a palace, 
when immediately visions of splendor, and evidences 
of wealth and power, invite us to enter the halls, and 
reach the presence of the King himself. We must attain 
assurance of the existence and activity of a Sovereign 
personal Creator, or all our convictions and our hopes 
are involved in obscurity. 

Nevertheless, an examination of the religions, theolo- 
gies and philosophies of the World reveals the fact that 
almost nowhere, at any time, has the existence of an 
absolutely first cause of all things been affirmed. All 
men have Gods; but very few men have thought that 
their Gods were either Creators of men, or makers 
and defenders of moral law. Everywhere, except to 
a limited extent among Hebrews and Christians, the 
eternal uncreated existence of matter has been assumed. 
The mystery of the cause of firstness has so dazed 
theologians and philosophers that they have hardly 
tried to define or find the First Cause, and have halted 

62 



DIVINE PERSON 63 

far short of it. Hence, with beliefs in some kind of 
God universal, unity of theologies and philosophies has 
not been even approached; and we may come to the 
study of the existence and nature of the Creator almost 
as if it were a new subject. 

The argument for the existence of God, from the 
evidences of intelligent and beneficent design in Nature, 
is so familiar to us, who are accustomed to the -., 

1 he argn- 

Hebrew Scriptures, that we do not notice how ment from 
little part it has in the World's beliefs, nor deslgn< 
how dexterously it is evaded by those who may wish to 
do so. No person has more fully or more eloquently 
than Immanuel Kant stated how the evidences of intel- 
ligent and benevolent aims in Nature bear us irresistibly 
to the acknowledgment of a Creator, and yet Kant 
denies that Reason reaches or justifies that conclusion. 
In fact, unless the argument from the evidence of intel- 
ligent and moral ends in Nature can be maintained by 
philosophical facts and principles more radically funda- 
mental and ontological than those usually advanced, it 
may be weakened by many lines of attack. But these 
attacks cannot harmonize together, and no two of them 
can be right at the same time. There are too many of 
them, and they are mutually destructive. Fortunately 
for the truth, the radical philosophical facts are attain- 
able; and the attacks, being inspired more by destructive 
purposes than by a self-sustaining and constructive phi- 
losophy, shatter their forces on these facts which are 
intrenched in consciousness and conscience. 

Attacks have been made on the argument from design 
by assaulting the word design with shrewd logical tricks. 
And if we use the word design carelessly, so that we 
assume in it the personal agency that needs to be proven, 



64 DIVINE PERSON 

we lay our argument open to the keen weapons and subtle 
onslaughts of the Humes and Voltaires, and all the Skep- 
tics and Deists. But in some of the preceding pages, 
when we were analyzing and defining human ideas, with 
no object except to accurately describe human intelli- 
gence, we recognized that intelligent action and design 
are synonymous terms. If we perceive intelligence in the 
universe, there is no intermediary between intelligence 
and design. But we have perceived this intelligence. 
We have perceived it directly and immediately, in our 
consciousness and our conscience, as one of the first 
principles of intelligent philosophy. And it is universal 
wherever there is intelligent activity; and its cogency, 
as evidence of design, cannot be lessened by tricks of 
phrases, such as the assertion that creation is something 
unique for which we have no analogies in experience. 

We have also recognized in preceding pages that all 
things are forces in action, and that all knowledge is per- 
Ar ument ception or conception of actions, and that the 
from perception of an action is one and the same 

causation. thing as the perception of causation. This 
principle, or rather this fact, is an essential and universal 
one in all perceptions, and in all things. There is no 
intermediary argument, or inference, between perception 

of things and perception of causation. Per- 
Cause of . . . , , 

complexity ception or the World is perception that it had 

andcorreia- a cause. Perception of the World is really a 

multitude of perceptions of a multitude of 

atoms, things, organs, actions, relations, influences and 

correlations; and, in each of them, causation and design 

(intelligent action) are obvious. Skeptical philosophy 

pleads that we cannot argue about this as we do about other 

causation and design. But, in fact, causation and design 






DIVINE PERSON 65 

are more directly perceptible in the correlation of forces 
and in harmonized complexity, than in anything else. It 
is possible to doubt, in a certain way, the causation of a 
single atom of matter; but doubt of causation and design 
in the harmonies, complexity, and correlations of the 
elements of the World, is irrational and impossible. But 
a willing, not to say a determined, skepticism has inge- 
niously devised many objections to a recognition of a 
Creator. Kant, who has made an eloquent statement of 
the evidences of design in Nature, and the cosmological 
argument for practical faith in a Creator, says after all, 
that this is only evidence of an Arranger of Nature 
rather than of an Author. Others have adduced as hin- 
drances to faith in a Creator, metaphysical theories like 
Idealism, psychological theories like Monism, material- 
istic theories like Evolution, and a deification of the 
word Law. Against all of these we may adduce the 
principles which inhere in our primal conceptions of 
being, and come to us in our plural consciousness, being 
the common sense of our daily experiences, classified and 
formulated by science and correlated by philosophy. 

A leader in these facts and principles is the axiom that 
all relations are mutual and reciprocal actions. There can 
be no one-sided relativity knowable or effec- 

-r-r 1 i 1.1 Relations 

tive. Hence, there can be no relations between are mutU al 
things, or between things and persons, unless an dredp- 
provisions for the mutuality of the relations 
have been made by The First Cause, in the constituted 
relativities of things. If there could be several, or 
many, self-existent Gods, they would be to each other 
as nothing and unknown; and any universes created by 
different Gods would be to the other Gods, and to each 
other, entirely devoid of relations and unknowable; and 



66 DIVINE PERSON 

even ideas could not be alike in any two universes that 
had not the same First Cause. On the other hand, the 
Creator of a universe could not divest himself of relation 
to it except by annihilating it; but he could change his 
works, or his ways, or his plans. Hence no Deity except 
the Creator of the universe could be its organizer or 
arranger, or stand in any relation to it, or even know of 
its existence. Of course, it follows that, even if self- 
existence is something uniform, we can never know any 
God but the one who made the universe; and we can 
know him only in the mutual relations which he has 
constituted. 

If we would pursue to the end the search for firstness 
in Nature, we must take up, scientifically and philosoph- 
ically, the study of atoms of matter; for sci- 
The ause ence knows no forces or activities of Nature 

of atoms is 

the Creator that are not atomic. Atoms -are not nuclei 
World or vemc ^ es floating in or carrying portions of 

some general world-force. An atom is known 
to us only as a set of motions co-ordinated together. 
Each motion is invariable in its quantity; and the char- 
acter of the atom is constituted by the nature and num- 
ber of the motions in the set; and it is effective, and per- 
haps measurable, according to the number, direction, 
speed, and length of its waves and revolutions, and the 
number and force of its collisions. If to our external 
observations we add our personal consciousness of the 
nature of force, action, and causation, we conceive an 
atom of matter to be a set of movements started by a 
volition of a Creator, and limited, invariable, sphered, 
commissioned, and localized by co-ordination in a nar- 
row range of action, adjusted to a larger external range 
of relations. As uncaused co-ordinations and harmonies 



DIVINE PERSON 67 

are impossible, the further back science, philosophy, and 
logic press their search towards the ultimate atoms of 
matter, the nearer they come to the recognition of one 
Cause of the universe and its atoms, and all its activities 
are relativities. 

But, however evident the existence of an intelligent 
First Cause may be to many, or even if to most persons, 
it is not strange that it should be denied by 

, . , r , , . , „ Materialism. 

multitudes of learned, intelligent, and well- 
disposed people. Therefore, while we may pass without 
discussion the coarse and brutal forms of ignorance, 
apathy, sensualism, and passion, which only make the 
pretense of belief in materialism an excuse for grossness, 
we must here give a respectful and rational consideration 
to three forms of materialistic philosophy which are 
somewhat prevalent among intelligent and learned men. 
These forms are deification of law, evolutionism, and 
materialistic pantheism, all of which gain a specious 
appearance of a scientific basis, but are in fact more 
theoretical and dogmatic than the most speculative phi- 
losophies, stop far short of first principles, suppress con- 
sciousness, and override Reason and philosophy. Pro- 
fessing to be rational, they demand of us unbounded 
credulity; for they require us to believe that matter is 
intelligence, or else Nature is governed by a Necessity 
that has no cause, and for the existence and power of 
which no explanation is conceivable. 

To some persons the evidence of the continuous 
operation of wisdom in the forces of Nature is convinc- 
ing. They rightly believe that the atomic 
forces of matter are in the matter; but they of " a ^ atlon 
try to rise to a higher level by affirming that 
there is a vague power controlling matter. They do not 



6S DIVINE PERSON 

define it, because definitions are troublesome things to 
defend. They call it Law, but they do not mean any- 
thing that in any other connection is called law. They 
do not make it an idea. It is an unfinished phrase. Law 
is not a force; nor does a conception of any law of 
Nature explain the source of a force, but only its behavior 
and regularity. If any vast number of atoms were to- 
gether, but separated absolutely from all others, they 
would act on each other according as the conditions 
favored or hindered their mutual approaches. But event- 
ually they would assume the character of a system, would 
exhibit everywhere the pursuit and attainment of intelli- 
gent aims, and would present that aspect which we call 
the effect of laws; the interworkings, harmonies and 
results of the highest and most complicated exhibitions, 
being traceable to the atomic forces intelligently cor- 
related at the creation. In our universe-system, these 
workings are of such vast numbers, and the harmonies and 
victories display such immeasurable intelligence, and the 
results are so beneficial to human beings, that the higher 
and subtler laws and workings become more conspicuous 
than the less and gross ones. But whether the system be 
large or small, since the intelligent co-ordination of 
magnificent results was initiated in the creation of the 
atoms, we are compelled by Reason and personal con- 
sciousness to believe that force and intelligent aims are 
effects of a personal Being's Will. 

Of all the forms of materialistic theology, none comes 

to men more seductively than that one which is called 

Evolutionism. It appeals to that pride and 

Evolution. , . lf . . . 

that natural and proper self-gratulation or 
scientific observers, which accompany great attainments 
and surprising discoveries. It is approved, as a prob- 



DIVINE PERSON 69 

able theory of the methods through which life has im- 
proved, even bv eminent believers in a personal First 
Cause. As a science, or rather in science, it has a noble 
sphere. But, so far as it is a theory of causation, it is 
naked materialism of the crudest kind. It does not offer 
any theory of a First Cause, nor even any facts that guide 
in that direction. If evolutionism could, as very prob- 
ably it may eventually, array ten thousand times as many 
facts as it has gathered, it would not touch the problem 
of first causation of matter. As a philosophy it aban- 
dons all first principles, and teaches that effects are 
greater than their causes. 

We do not care to antagonize here those eminent 
observers whose science has added glory to our age, 
made our world seem larger and fuller, alike of beauty, 
uses and intelligence, and has sent thrills of enthusiasm 
through all circles of intelligent people. But for the 
petty and superficial scholarship, which takes note only 
of the forms of things, while it overlooks all the facts of 
animal chemistry and the dependence of life on organi- 
zations, and co-ordinations and vital functions, and 
ignores multitudes of facts where it adduces one, how 
can we entertain any respect? How can we respect the 
evolutionism which is chiefly an arithmetical audacity? 
— which is not appalled by the obvious necessity for 
infinite time for the infinite multitude of the processes 
which it affirms — an audacity which is ever able to say, 
Take more time. Figures are inexhaustible. 

Reason and true Science bid the student of evolution 
to look both ways along the line of study. They note 
that the agencies, processes and results are in 

1 r , • r 11.. Involution. 

the system of things from the beginning. 

They turn our admiration towards, rather than from, a 



70 DIVINE PERSON 

plan of creation. They set before us the science of 
Typical Forms, as the most wonderful thing in Nature, 
and demand our admiration of the divine prescience, 
which, devising a moderate number of perfect ideals of 
type, could modify these in infinite variety, and could 
produce with exact adjustment to their necessary environ- 
ment and their circumstances, alike the minute and sim- 
ple forms, and those enormous saurians, batrachians, 
mammals and birds, whose antecedents are undiscovered, 
and apparently are undiscoverable. They set up involu- 
tion as a companion study to evolution. They teach us 
that seeds and germs produce what has been put into 
them, and that whatever involution there is goes on in 
an adjustment to an intelligent co-ordination of the 
whole system of Nature. Nature is a science of ideals, 
which are intelligently devised plans carried into effect 
with perfect skill by unlimited power. 

There is a materialism that arrogates to itself dignity 
and an appearance of moral character, by associating 

an acknowledgment of Deity with its adora- 
Pantheism. . _ „ . ,, , . 

tion of matter. It calls itself Pantheism, 
with emphasis on the first or the second syllable, according 
as it desires to deny a Creator or to confess a Cause. It 
is an empty name. It aims to divert attention from the 
inadequacy of its ideas of The Cause, by dilating on the 
splendor of effects. It attempts to make zero enormous. 
When it, in a weak and halting way, confesses a Divinity 
in the greatness, the relations and interworkings of the 
universe, but declares still that the intelligent and vital 
force is that of matter, it retains all the weakness, narrow- 
ness, and irrationality of materialism. So long as it 
affirms that Deity is immanent in matter, inherent in and 
identical with it, it is irrational, and has no adequate 



DIVINE PERSON 7 1 

recognition of the Cause of intelligence, order, beauty 
and beneficence. When, on the other hand, it affirms 
that Deity is pervasive of matter, inherent in it, but not 
identical with it, it has only debased its ideas of The 
Creator unnecessarily and irrationally. 

If, in the preceding pages, we have kept on the true 
lines of science, philosophy and reasoning, we have 
found, in causation, consciousness and ontol- 

r ,i .« j i Summary of 

os:v, assurances of the creation and control .. 

oJ 7 the reason- 

of the substance of the universe by a First ingoncausa- 
Cause that is superior to it, absolute Master, J 10 r n of mat " 
intelligent, aiming at great ends, and securing 
those ends, not by himself working in matter, and being its 
force and vitality, but by constituting its relativities 
through and in the act of causation of its elements. 
The reasoning must proceed much further before it dem- 
onstrates in this Creator the most and the greatest of 
those attributes to the sum, or the possessor, of which 
we give the name God, and. bring our adoration. But 
even so much understanding of him, as we gain in this 
reasoning, exhibits him as having character, wisdom, 
purposes and power that can inhere only in a Person, 
and that Person, One who is sole Sovereign, and glorious 
and mighty beyond our power to measure in our con- 
ceptions. 

§ 2. AN INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT 

By the same consciousness and reasoning which 
demonstrate that matter and all material things are coor- 
dinations of activities, and therefore have a First Cause, 
or Creator, it is also demonstrated that intelligence and 
intellect have a Creator. A man is of a higher order of 
being than other earthly creatures, because he can make 



72 DIVINE PERSON 

his Self and his actions the objects of his study. But 
it is yet true that all his ideas are conceptions of things 
and of their relations. Even his highest, general and 
abstract, ideas and principles, are in their essence concep- 
tions of material things, or of living active beings, or of 
their relations. Even if it were possible that there could 
be truth which was not in such connections and rela- 
tions, whether it were self-existent, or were created by 
The Creator of the universe, it would be to us as noth- 
ing. Hence, as a coordination of movements makes 
matter, and living beings, and the universe, and its rela- 
tivities, and therefore it has a personal Creator, so the 
coordination and correlations of matter and mind make 
intelligence, and these mutual and reciprocal relations 
must have had an intelligent personal First Cause, or 
Creator, who made both matter and mind. This reason- 
ing is, however, denied and attacked in several ways. 

First, it is said that knowledge is only conceptions, 

of which no explanation can be given, and of which no 

defense can be made. This is idealism, not 

Idealism. . , . , 

objective and plausible like Plato s, but sub- 
jective. It can only acquire plausibility by claiming 
that all ideas are results of immediate consciousness. 
Such idealism ridicules the logic of common sense, bur- 
lesques consciousness, and denies causation. It ignores 
the fact that our consciousness not only exhibits ideas, 
but affirms judgments, and declares truth and untruth. 
As primal consciousness affirms that material things are 
real, so our intellectual consciousness affirms that our 
generalizations, correlations, and classifications of facts 
are true or correct. Ignoring these facts of conscious- 
ness, idealism denies causation, subverts all beliefs, and 
leaves its victim no stay against skepticism, and no res- 



DIVINE PERSON 73 

cue from despair. It is only a deification of puzzles; 
but the World will not accept a philosophy that calls a 
man a corporate vacuum, worships Zero as Creator, installs 
negations in place of truths, and uses Reason for its own 
degradation. The World cannot honor a theory that 
destroys every gcod belief, and builds no structures, and 
that delights in casting shadows over all human paths, 
and in embroidering the drapery of an universal coffin. 
Secondly, our confidence in the existence of a Cause 
of intelligence is assaulted with an attack aimed at the 
foundations of all beliefs, and at the existence 

. , . , . Skepticism. 

of all assurance; but only as aimed against Agnosticism, 
faith in a personal God does it exhibit any 
earnestness, or much motive. In its milder form it is 
reasoning, but only to certain points of interrogation and 
suspense. It graciously tolerates our beliefs as amiable 
weaknesses; but it asks us to honor it because it cannot 
see its way through the labyrinths of truth. This is not 
a philosophy, but a surrender. Doubt is noble so long 
as it fairly weighs reasoning, refuses to be credulous, and 
has some principles that are touchstones and gauges. 
But when it is a stagnation of thought, an atrophy of 
Reason, an indolent habit, a contempt of conservatism, 
or a disregard of consciousness, it is contemptible. 
Skepticism that is a vitalized interrogation, an organized 
feebleness, a chronic perplexity, has no claims to respect. 
In its stronger and more aggressive forms, with the 
name Agnosticism, it is neither puerile nor ineffective. 
Denying the authority of consciousness, it urges its own 
logic of negations, and denies everything. Of course, 
its logic lacks premises, and can have no confirmations; 
but the passion of denial, a zeal of war, like the enchant- 
ment of love, is its own reason and defense, or at least 



74 DIVINE PERSON 

is all that itself desires. Agnosticism that does not go 
to the extent of a denial of all intelligence, but only 
denies that we can know God, presents plausible argu- 
ments, and must have respectful, logical, and philosoph- 
ical answers. 

First, it is said that a man's conceptions must neces- 
sarily be mannish, imperfect and erroneous in respect to 
Beings that are superior to himself, and to 
Anthropo- tn i n pr S that he cannot himself make. This is 

morpnism. ° 

plausible, but irrational. We cannot know, 
and do not need to know, all about God; but neither 
science, reason nor philosophy tends towards showing 
that God could not make men so that they can receive 
true information from him, or so that their leading con- 
ceptions of him, in consciousness and conscience, are 
incorrect. We may even say that if any of our concep- 
tions are untrue because they are mannish, it is the 
scientific conceptions of the material things that are 
doubtful; and it is vital principles of causation and 
moral relations (interpreted to us by our vital conscious- 
ness) that must be trusted. We may admit that, on the 
principles of Agnosticism, if there were two Gods the 
one could not communicate to the other any thought in 
his mind nor any fact that originated by his own will; 
and yet a man may know what such a God could not 
know; the philosophical principle being that knowledge 
of facts does not wholly depend on greatness of the 
knower, but does depend, for its very beginning, on pro- 
visions for intelligence made by the Creator of minds 
and of things in one system, and adjusted by mutual 
and reciprocal relations. In other words, the relativity 
of knowledge, which skeptics take as a basis for their 
unbelief, does really limit the extent of our knowledge; 



DIVINE PERSON 75 

but it is the one condition that makes knowledge possi- 
ble, and by it some, and even sufficient, knowledge of 
The Creator may be attained by men. 

Secondly, the dogma that a man cannot know God 
takes the form of an assertion that a finite being cannot 
know an infinite one — a most seductive Infinite 
phrase, but an irrational and even an un- Being, 
meaning one. Sometimes an attempt is n mty ' 
made to make the phrase philosophical by making it 
read, " The finite cannot know the infinite." This, how- 
ever, strips it of whatever appearance of meaning it had 
in its other form; for there can be no "The infinite," 
except "The Infinite Being" or infinity, and neither of 
these is it designed to speak of. 

The word infinite is either a negative word, or an 
instrument for tricks. It means incomplete or unfin- 
ished. In this sense it cannot describe a perfect Being; 
but it might describe our idea of him; in which case it 
would not mean that he is unlimited, but that our con- 
ception is incomplete. In fact, if we say Man cannot 
know the Infinite Being, we only mean that a man can- 
not circumscribe his own uncircumscribed idea. Infi- 
nite is a negative word, and the attempt to make it a pos- 
itive conception is an effort to turn nothing into some- 
thing. The attempt to make ififinite a definite word is 
only the effort of a man to outrun himself. We can 
always say More, After, and Before. If all space were 
filled with machines multiplying figures for ages, we 
could still say more: but it would not mean anything 
except what the noun might mean which we write after 
the figures. 

Infinite is not a proper term to apply to God. An 
unfinished, incomplete God, who cannot reach the com- 



y6 DIVINE PERSON 

pass of his own being, is an absurdity. In ontology 
there are no infinites. All things, and all Beings, even 
The Creator himself among them, are just what they are, 
no more nor less. A Deity can be perfect, supreme, and 
unlimited by anything except himself, but he is a very 
definite and positive Being. There can be no infinite 
attributes of Deity; for perfect ones are not infinite. 
Infinite wisdom would be unfinished wisdom ; but 
perfect wisdom knows all that there is to know, and 
there it ends. Infinite power and possibility are, in 
ontological philosophy, absurd; for ontology knows 
nothing but actual being, and that is the one thing 
that is fixed and definite. In ontology, that is to 
say in being, there are no possibilities (i. e., uncer- 
tainties or contingencies) except those of the will and 
actions of free personal Beings. Infinite possibility 
is impossible finiteness. Our uncertainty of the Creator's 
plans and will is not ontological possibility. There is no 
infinity even of space; for space is only known to us as 
direction of our attention, limited by reach. But direc- 
tion has no quantity, and reach is limitation. 

The conceptions of unity and relativity will contend 
with each other in our minds so long as we study being 
with only the verb to be, and the nouns essenee, being and 
substance, and so long as we think that relativity is 
unworthy of Deity. 

There are many acute and learned persons on whose 

minds the conception of personal unity, and the mysteries 

of being, exercise such potent control that 

Momsm. ^^ a ^ rm tnat a ^ fofag [ s ne un it, in such 

sense that all substance or essence is one. 
This may be pantheism, if it emphasizes the conception 
of God; or idealism, if it extols ideas; or it may go to 



DIVINE PERSON *]*] 

such an extreme of monism as to declare that mind and 
its ideas, Deity and matter, cause and effect, are all one. 
But one what? That, it cannot tell. In obliterating all 
relations it obliterates all quality, character and name; 
and its one cannot be being, essence, substance nor per- 
son, nor anything else than zero. A Monism that has 
no monad, a Unitism that has no unit, abolishes all con- 
ceptions, and becomes a mere trickery of words, a turn 
of a kaleidoscope. It is born dead, and its friends can 
do little more than invent names for a coffin-plate. 
When it becomes an enthusiasm for elimination, a frenzy 
for subtraction, a passion for denials, shrinkage and 
emptiness, it is a surrender of psychology and a flight 
of philosophy. With a pretense of service, it dethrones 
Reason. Under a show of homage, it buries its King. 
It claims a right to throw all philosophy and intelligence 
into its bottomless pit. And yet it grasps for rescue the 
names being and substance; but its being cannot be, and 
its substance neither stands, nor is under anything. 
Unitism, however, rarely attempts to be pure and unadul- 
terated monism. It must use some pantheism, idealism 
or materialism, if it will be anything more than mere 
phrases. Even so, if it calls all intelligence a wave of 
the All-Mind, or all second causes vibrations of the All- 
Power, or all operations changes of state of the iUl-Sub- 
stance, its First Cause is impotence, and its All-Being is 
zero in a vacuum. 

There is a true infinity and a true unit. The Uni- 
verse, in its coordination by and with one First Cause, 
has unity and totality, which are the categories The true 
of the quantity of a unit that is not a Person, infinity and 
The unit is the unity of a system. In it all umt ' 
things, all force, all life, all relations, consist, or stand 



78 DIVINE PERSON 

together. And this is infinite, because there is nothing 
but itself that can limit its Self. All its relativities are 
combined in the causal relation of the will of the 
Creator.* 

§ 3. A MORAL ARGUMENT 

We have now recognized that the coordinations of 
forces, and the correlations of intelligence, demonstrate 
the creation of Nature by an intelligent First Cause. 
When we advance further, to the study of moral life, 
with its ends and aims of creation, its values of life, its 
relations to the happiness of personal Beings, its con- 
ceptions of lightness and duty, and we find these to have 
their whole essence and character in conceptions of rela- 
tion to a First Cause of the universe, the demonstration 
of the existence and rule of a Creator becomes an irre- 
sistible conviction. 

The conviction of this relation is so innate in con- 
Th olo sciousness that, always and everywhere, theol- 

precedes ogy has preceded philosophy, and apparently 

p 1 osop y. tnere wou id nowhere have been a philosophy 
if there had not first been a Moral Science. There 

*Plato closely approached this conception of the Universe-System. He 
declared that the universe (heaven, ouranos) contains all being and all pos- 
sibilities. And Aristotle said the same of the aion. But neither Plato nor 
Aristotle completed the conception by seeing the causal relation of The Cre- 
ator. Both believed matter uncaused and eternal; but Plato said that the only 
things worthy to be called existent are ideas {eide, appearances) which are 
forms, caused by God's thought, and this makes one system of all that is 
truly being. Aristotle more widely failed to reach the conception, because 
he excluded finite things from God's aidn, and he discussed infinity only as 
limitation of human knowledge of what is unlimited. He does not use the 
word infinite in reference to God. He says (Metaphysics, Book X, ch. 10), 
infinity is not knowable, and an entity subsisting in actuality cannot be 
infinite, and neither space nor body can be infinite. 

There is much instruction and suggestion in the Greek Philosophers' 
words. Their infinite is apeiron (non-experimental) and a'idion (i. e., not 
individual, idion). A'idion at first meant indefinite, and later unlimited. 
Ho aion is "the bound outside of which there is nothing according to 
Nature." To on {the being) and to hen {the one) are impersonal universal 
being. To apeiron (the untried, or non-experimental) is the unreachable. 
All of these words are in the neuter gender except aion, and that is only 
masculine because it belongs to a class of words (ending in accented on, and 
signifying a container) which are always masculine. 



DIVINE PERSON 79 

would have been no Aristoteliauism if there had been 
no Platonism. There would have been no occidental 
modern philosophy without both of these assisted by 
Hebrew theology. Even the recognition of conscience 
in philosophy preceded the recognition of the authority 
of consciousness, and the word consciousness* All the 
history of modern philosophy, beginning with Socrates, 
has been a history of moral ideas, beginning in con- 
science of men's relation to a governing Creator. 

Nature is a ministry for human Persons. Its whole 
teaching in physical science is a display of aims at intel- 
ligent ends. Its whole teaching in social sci- Moral 
ence is a demonstration that these ends are Design, and 
the good and happiness of human Persons. re atlons - 
Its chief teaching in psychological science is, that con- 
sciousness is a sense of a relation to the will, ends, and 
rights of a First Cause. Its great lesson in Moral science 
is, that intelligent and sentimental human life is in rela- 
tion to the desires and sentiments of that First Cause. 
The long course of philosophical, scientific, and logical 
study, proceeds steadily towards the full recognition of a 
creating and governing Cause, who, through the relations 
which he has established, displays his nature and charac- 
ter. But if the way of philosophy and science is long 
and tardy, that of conscience is early and quick, and lies 
at the very beginning of the pursuit of the truth that has 
value for human Beings, and for their Creator. Con- 
science makes a short path across the fields of philoso- 
phy to its God. 

*Although the Greeks used the verb sunoida (I know by myself) to sig- 
nify positive assurance, the noun suneidesis was scarcely, if at all, used be- 
fore the Christian era. Philo, of Alexandria, a Platonistic Jew, uses the 
word suneidesis only twice, but us^s the word suneidos a score of times, and 
always with the signification conscience, and always in connection with the 
word clenc/ws, conviction. 



80 DIVINE PERSON 

The formal moral argument for the existence of a 
personal Creator and Ruler is neither long nor obscure. 
It begins with the principles of causation. It recognizes 
values in life, which are inwrought in the plan of crea- 
tion. It recognizes these as being dependent for their 
attainment on sympathies, tastes, affections, and all else 
that we call moral character, in human Beings. It sees 
all these as relations that, like all relations, must have 
had a cause; but it also sees in these the elements that 
we call Tightness and good and justice and holiness, and 
which can have no explanation or authority except as the 
Will of The Cause of the universe. The principles of 
Oni as a ontology affirm that only as a Cause has God 
creator can a right to govern. No God, however good, 
God rule. w j se , or mighty, in his sphere, would have 
either right or power to rule a World that he did not 
make; and if conceivably we could know such an alien 
God, we might adore and love him perhaps, but to serve 
him would be a crime against our Creator. 

The principles of ontology go on to affirm that a 
Creator whose Will ordained a World which sought val- 
. ues for human Beings in their purity, affec- 
anaiogous tions, sympathies with goodness, and mutual 
to his work. i oves an( j ministries, must himself be ardent 
with like holiness, love, and personal character, and be a 
Person in the best and highest sense of the word. 

The nature of personality, as known by us in con- 
sciousness and conscience, is such a conception as per- 
mits to us no idea of creation, and especially 
Creation Q f mora i orc [ er anc j i aw> except as the act of a 

Will. Philosophy, psychology, and logic, all 
indeed lead us to a recognition of a necessary unity in 
all being, but it is not a monism justifying an affirmation 



DIVINE PERSON 8 I 

that there is but one substance in the universe, and that 
material and vital activities are only changes of state of 
the monad substance. In all such language the word 
substance must be either empty of all meaning, or describe 
some divine matter or body. It cannot be made to have 
a meaning by any logic about unity or being; and if 
God's works, intellectual and sentimental, are performed 
by a sort of physical performance of his spiritual sub- 
stance, the fact is unknowable and inconceivable to us, 
and the idea of it is abhorrent to all our vital and moral 
consciousness. Moreover, a change of state of a Being 
that is unity and immaterial is impossible, and if it were 
possible, no change of state could be a cause of anything. 
There is a moral monism; but it is the unity of a moral 
system held together by relation to one Will that is 
replete with personal sympathies, character, and aims. 
Only once can the paradox of self-existence be possible, 
and it cannot be a paradox of anything but glory and 
honor in itself. Self-existence is the unit which philoso- 
phy declares, but it is a self-existence of a Cause, a Will, 
glorious and infinite in its creative work. Consciousness 
and conscience are the windows through which souls look 
on the ways in which one perfect Person has exercised 
magnificent purposes for loving ends. And when they 
have looked, the language of souls speaks infinite vol- 
umes of happiness, and intelligence, and love, and hope, 
in one thought and name, "Our Father." 

Even Kant says, " Teleological unity is so important 
a condition of the application of my Reason to Nature, 
that it is impossible for me to ignore it. But the sole 
condition, so far as my knowledge extends, under which 
this unity can be my guide, is the assumption that a 
supreme Intelligence has ordered all things according to 



82 DIVINE PERSON 

the wisest ends. * * * The conception of this Cause 
must contain certain determinate qualities; and it must, 
therefore, be regarded as the conception of a Being 
possessing all power, wisdom, etc., in one bond." Again 
he says, "In the sphere of moral belief I must act in obe- 
dience to the moral law, * * * I am irresistibly 
constrained to believe in the existence of God, and in a 
future life. * * * My belief in God is so inter- 
woven with my moral nature that I am under as little 
apprehension of having the former torn from me as of 
losing the latter." 

When we have declared that our Creator is a person, 
have we said all that we know of him, or do the princi- 
ples of ontology, and the analogies of ex- 

Pluralityin r . , , . , . , , 

the Divine istence in personal relations, furnish the means 
Unity. f or vet m0 re conception and description? We 

know him in activities and power as a Cause, 
and in wisdom as a Mind, and in aims and loves as such 
as that which in ourselves we call Spirit. But shall we 
say that he is each of these, or that he has them? Hu- 
man language is unable to define the distinction, either 
in ourselves or in God. We must say both is and has, 
according to our viewing-point and the relations of our 
phrases; but the three natures must be one Person as they 
are in men. And yet, is it not possible that, in the pro- 
fundities of the nature of the self-existent Person, who 
correlates in his Self his power, mind and spirit, there 
may be distinctions, with powers of intercourse and rela- 
tion, making a glorious plurality of personality? If, 
with our poor logic, we declare God to be self-sufficient, 
yet our personal consciousness of the nature and nat- 
uralness of love joins with our conviction that his long- 
ings of love have made him a Creator, to make it 



DIVINE PERSON 83 

rational for us to believe that love in God is something 
that has demanded, and has had eternally, the satisfac- 
tion of personal plural intercourse of spirit with spirit 
in himself. Philosophy and ontology demand oneness 
in The Creator in respect to self-existence, and demand 
that The Cause of everything that is not the Person of 
God shall be the One God, and demand absolute har- 
mony of cooperation between any and all Persons of 
Deity. But philosophy and ontology have not learned 
to describe personality, except by its doings. The doer 
is not seen, weighed, measured nor grasped. Human 
life below consciousness is inscrutable; and is only 
knowable as power, intelligence and spirituality, in one- 
ness of personal being. Still less is the person of God 
describable, either positively or negatively. But so long 
as we maintain his self-existent unity, and his unity as 
Cause of all that is not his Person, we may believe that 
the perfection and bliss of God rather require than dis- 
credit plurality in himself. Upon what else could the in- 
telligence and the moral nature of Deity be exercised 
before his creation of inferior persons, if there were not 
in his Self capacities of intercourse and relation? All 
our conceptions of God sink into utter blankness if we 
try to think of his wisdom as having nothing to know 
except his own oneness, or if we try to think of his moral 
nature as having none of the relativities that are the 
essence of morality and its loves. Self-sufficiency of a 
Person without relations, is to us a phrase without sig- 
nificance, or else it is shocking to our moral sense. 

In two ways, however, we may name The Creator with 
names which, if not perfectly explicable, are yet replete 
with precious meaning to us. We may not unreservedly 
say that he is power or wisdom; but, on the principle 



84 DIVINE PERSON 

that the greater contains the less, we may say that he is 
spirit, or a spirit. We look on power as the servant of 
God our mind, and we see no worthy field for the ex- 

Father and ercise of mind except for moral relations of 
a spmt. persons; and we see these only in the exer- 

cises of the loves of personal beings pursuing what to 
them and to their Cause are the values of life; and we 
recognize these as inhering in that personal nature which 
we call spirit. On the principle that a Cause must be 
greater than its effects, we must believe our Creator to be 
immeasurably better than our conceptions; but on the 
principle that a Cause must construct his designs accord- 
ing to his own nature, we must believe that our Creator 
is a spirit, in some analogy to our own spiritual being, 
and that he acts, as is the nature of spirits, by personal 
Will, like a King upon his throne. So in the truest 
and best meaning, in the deepest vital meaning, in the 
sweetest and most soul-filling meaning, Man can say of 
and to his Creator, " Our Father." 



CHAPTER VI 

THE RELATIONS OF THE DIVINE AND HUMAN 
PERSONS 

In the preceding pages we have recognized relations 
between men and their Creator which are of transcendent 
importance; but we have not stated all the principles 
involved, nor all of the logical deductions from them. 
Some of these other principles we must notice here, in 
order that we may see the momentous interests that 
depend on our attitude towards God, and on his atti- 
tude towards us. 

i. The Creator of a system of physical things and 
vital beings cannot cease to have relation to that system, 
except by annihilating it; but he can annihi- The Creator 
late it, if he has not made it on moral princi- and the 

11 . r i • rr x universe 

pies that require eternity for their effect. It a i way s 
would perhaps be impossible for us to con- connected. 
ceive philosophically an annihilation of matter, if we 
really knew it as substance. But we only know it as 
motions; and if counter motions should be set against 
these, the forces or motions on both sides might be 
reduced to absolute zero. As we know them, all effects 
are perpetual, whether they be effects of will or of motions 
of a substance. Hence, as we know substance, we can 
see how it can be balanced in its forces, and be bound by 
another force; but this leaves it still existent. How far 
its existence may be dependent on the continued will of 

85 



86 RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 

the Cause, we, perhaps, can never know; nor have we 
much interest in knowing. What we are interested in 
knowing is, that effects are persistent, and that they have 
their free identity, but are constantly related to their 
Creator in a relation analogous to ownership. He can- 
not discard .them, and they cannot escape from him, un- 
less he annihilates them. But, for aught that we know, 
he may create new elements, and institute new operations, 
and so greatly change the course of Nature. And, inas- 
much as moral facts and moral law are wholly made of 
relations between The Creator and his creatures, and 
these moral relations are, in this World, bound up in the 
material constitution of things, The Creator is always 
in the relation of a Moral Governor to human beings, 
and to the World that is their home. 

2. In The Personal First Cause of such an universe, 
whose creative act is by will, and who remains in per- 
Providence si stent governmental relation to his creation, 
Prayer. there are possibilities of additions and modi- 

Supernature. fi cat j ons to ^is wor k. An universe-system 
which includes free-willed persons, and is made for 
adaptation to that freedom, has, for its natural comple- 
ment, free personal action by The Creator, to meet such 
otherwise uncontrollable action of the created persons. 
It is impossible for our moral sense to justify God for 
creating, if there is no supplemental power of ministry, 
providence, instruction and help from The Creator. 
Without a belief of this, all moral ideas are vitiated, 
and all evidence of harmony in the universe is invali- 
dated. With our belief of a personal Creator and moral 
Ruler, a divine providence and supernatural help are 
reasonable expectations. Such a conception, while it 



RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 8? 

glorifies God, invites and even commands the spirits of 
men to come to the Spirit of God, in communion of love 
and faith, to ask in prayer what their souls desire and 
need, and to receive answers and beneficence by his per- 
sonal performance. 

3. While the relations of The Creator to men are 
analogous to those of ownership, he has voluntarily 
modified them, by giving to men moral en- Moralrela _ 
dowments, and adapting them to moral order tionsof Cre- 
and rule. Neither moral ill nor moral good a t°d Arsons 
can come to us without the exercise of the 
free-will of persons; for moral good and ill are exercises 
of freedom of personal life. Moral relations, like all 
other relations, are reciprocal and mutual. The atti- 
tude of God is that of a Cause, Owner, Ruler and 
father, the attitude of a spirit towards spirits. The 
relation of men to God is that of duty and responsibility 
or obligation; for with such names moral consciousness 
decribes its sense of the normal subjection of a free- 
will-ed person to his Cause and Holy Ruler and loving 
Father. An abnormal attitude, disposition or will 
towards The Creator is sin. Violations of God's desires, 
or of his Will, as shown in Nature, Reason, Conscience, 
or otherwise, whether the violation be in our dealing 
with our Self, or with him, or with our fellows, are sins 
so far as they are performances of our spirits, or result 
from failure of our spirits to perform their duties. Acts 
that are only muscular, and thoughts that are only percep- 
tions, memories, or imaginations, cannot be said to be 
moral except as they are results of neglects or of wicked- 
ness. But acts of Will, or those that arise from tastes 
or habits, and those that are held by our atten tion, and 



SS RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 

cherished in our tastes, have a relation to God's Will 
and have moral character.* 

Many sweet and saintly spirits torment themselves 
with a fear that fugitive thoughts, and bodily suggestions 
to which they do not yield, are sins. Other persons per- 
suade themselves that they are innocent while performing 
acts criminal, violent, or beastly. The moral principle 
by which all cases may be judged, seems to be this, viz.: 
Sin is wrong relation to God's Will respecting One's 
personal being, or his attitude towards God, or One's 
relations and acts to One's fellow-men. Hence, acts, 
thoughts and desires that in themselves have no wrong, 
become wrong in such relations of men as cross God's 
Will. And acts that are against God's Will under their 
circumstances, are not moral wrong, if they do not result 
from a wrong spirit towards God, or from previous neg- 
lect or self-corruption. There is sin when the personal 
Spirit loves and desires to do; or does recklessly, any- 
thing which does, or might do violence to the Will of 
God in the universe, however innocent the same things 
might be in other relations. 

Character is one of our imperfect names for the Being 
of a spirit. It is his Self, as having quality and disposi- 
tion. A man in cultivating his loves, chang- 
M° ral j n g n i s disposition, informing himself of 

moral order and good and evil, and in train- 
ing his spirit, is making himself lovable or unlovable 
to God. Sin is a wrong disposition of spirit; but inas- 
much as all of our acts have a relation to God's Will for 
ourselves or our fellow-men, they all somewhere are con- 

*Discussion of the importance of free-will seems to have begun with Philo 
Judaeus, who says: "It was necessary that free-will {to hekousion) should be 
displayed as a counterpoise to involuntariness {to akousion) for the perfection 
of the universe."— On The Confusion of Tongues, ch. 55. j 



RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 89 

trolled by our moral character, and must be judged as 
moral acts. 

4. Although it is impossible for us to attain to such a 
comprehensive view of God's rule and plan, that we can 
understand how, in his love and his justice, 

he could create a World for so much evil and t0 ° cr e a " e g * 
suffering, growing out of men's free-will, yet men with 
it is apparent that only with and by free-will ^ domof 
can men be moral beings, or be God's chil- 
dren, or attain the chief good and values of life. With- 
out it men would be either fools or beasts, without 
virtue, loveliness or exalted happiness. As we can discover 
in the universe no higher end than the glory and bless- 
edness of The Creator in the moral excellence and hap- 
piness of his children, as free Persons, we may believe 
that the awful power to sin and suffer is in some way 
consistent with his perfect benevolence. We can see 
that endowment with personal freedom is of vastly more 
value to a man, and to the universe, than constitutional 
or enforced innocence would be. 

5. Moral law is the personal attitude of God towards 
persons. It is his wisdom joined with his desire, in an 
expression of his Will concerning free-willed 

.,,,,, The laws of 

persons, respecting the values and ends of God. They 
personal existence. It is his wish, animate arehi s 

! , • r • r 1 • loves. 

with the infinite earnestness of his supreme 
and perfect life, as operative in the universe. In its first 
aspect it is that for which, so far as Men can know God, 
he lives. The awful momentum of his Being is behind 
it. It is his self-expression moving his beneficent, but also 
terrible arm. It is his self-love, and his out-going love. 
And, because it is his love, it is the most absolute and 
fixed element in his revelation of himself to men. 



90 RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 

6. As a love is a personal expression of a sense of the 
value of an object, so it is also a dislike of the opposite. 
The are * n tne sentmients of a spirit — those surges of 
also his in- life-action which refer us only to conscious- 
dignations. nesg an( j con science f or t } ie j r explanation and 
justification — the undercurrent of love is abhorrence. In 
one passion subjective love and hate meet objective good 
and evil; to embrace the one, to fight the other. Love 
dreads, and clashes, and hates. Only a Being who loves 
strongly can know indignation and detestation. A no- 
tion that God can act, or ought to act, alike towards 
good and bad is at variance with every intuition of moral 
sense, and would infuse a tinge of contempt into our 
conception of divine amiableness. Hard as it may be 
for us to conceive that God is animated by abhorrence 
of a wicked human spirit, the opposite conception would 
be irrational and immoral. 

7. Divine law, or The Creator's self-expression, in 
aiming at or loving certain ends, and in making their 

attainment dependent on certain lines of 
alternative act; ion, causes opposite results of opposite 
vindicatory actions, and thus appears to satisfy itself with 

these results. In physical things that satis- 

punitive. r J ° 

faction may be real; but in moral things it 
cannot be true, so long as words have meanings, and 
sentiments are expressions of personal being and char- 
acter. All moral philosophy and intuitions affirm that 
God is not satisfied with his punitive and alternative 
law. There is love in it; but it is love for the system 
which is upheld, and for the good which is sought, and 
for the persons who are in harmony with the good ends 
pursued. 

While we are convinced that in some ways punitive 



RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 9 1 

law may produce good for even the punished persons, 
this conviction rests on spiritual rather than visible 
grounds; for moral judgment affirms that an offender 
when punished receives not only the natural, but the de- 
served results of his life-action. In the intuitions of 
conscience, punishment has a meaning which cannot be 
described as chastisement, correction, or discipline. 
There is a meaning in ill desert which is not good, 
although it carries the view of our spirits to the verge of 
a rayless abyss. But what it is the desert of one person 
to receive, it is the duty of some other person to admin- 
ister; for there is no ill desert where there is not some 
mutual relation of persons. Chief among the persons 
who have a duty, even if it is self-imposed, towards 
offenders, is he who is the Guardian and Cause of all 
good. 

The belief that God stands in an attitude of indigna- 
tion and antipathy to a spirit who is rebellious against 
good, is part of our conception of holiness and justice in 
God. The intuition that God loves good spirits, and is 
averse to bad ones, is one belief. 

The justification of God for the creation of men to 
be wicked and miserable is not one special and side- 
problem in philosophy. It is the general in- 
scrutable problem of the origin of creation. 
It involves to their utmost depths the problems of God's 
self-existence, and of his nature and purposes. Reason 
is blind and impotent before these problems. But Man 
and life and moral law are here for facts; and the more 
exact and imperative the law is, so much the more is the 
evidence conspicuous that in it is the vital stress of an 
infinitely adorable and loving God. 

8. The act that is performed has become eternal. Life 



92 RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 

is not destroyed as it passes, but becomes in moral judg- 
ment the real life and fact. Life is self-mak- 

Past life, , . . 

persistent mg for eternity, and carries forward the crea- 
morai reia- t j on b v Qod, who works for persistent effects. 

tion to God. _. . / , , , „ , 

This is the grand and awful mystery of spirit- 
ual life. In his consciousness and his conscience, a man 
knows the thread of his personal identity, and that his 
past is his persistent Self. The history of a soul must 
always be a part of that for which he is perpetually under 
judgment before himself and his fellows and the infinite 
Creator. 

In view of the principles before stated, nothing can 
surpass in momentous interest the questions, Can 
wrecked souls be rescued, and how? Can God 
change? Can a free-will be made to have a 
new disposition? Can a heart reform its loves? Can 
an ignorant mind be made intelligent? Can a gross 
taste be made delicate and pure? Can character be 
radically changed? Can a soul be emptied of its decep- 
tions and wrong prejudices? Can a spirit that is foul 
and violent be made sweet and reasonable? 

The philosophy which argues that there is a Creator 
and a moral law, but goes no further, we call Natural 

Relisrion. It is a small part of true Conduct- 
Natural °, ., r 
religion has lve Philosophy; yet many persons compla- 

no remedy cently regard their ideas of this as if they 

for sin. J . , . . „ J 

were a virtue and even a salvation. But 
Natural Religion, even while it sees beneficence in the 
universe, is a religion of condemnation and despair, a 
dread of a God terrible in the severity of an inflexible 
Judge. Natural Religion exalts law that demands 
righteousness, but has neither mercy nor pity, and can 
only command and demand. Even when Natural 



SALVATION 93 

Religion acknowledges that God is a loving Person, it 
yet sees him as pushing forward for goodness a law in 
inflexible hostility to its opposites. 

Conscience, that knows sin as a personal matter be- 
tween souls and God, discovers no possibility of pardons. 
It quakes as in the grasp of an infinite arm, 

. . m . , Conscience 

and as hearing the voice of an insulted, out- knows no 
raged and indignant personal Sovereign. It pardon nor 

. . . , . . , Savior. 

cannot conceive that wicked spirits can de- 
serve salvation, and it cannot discover how holy God can 
give to men what they do not deserve, or withhold what 
they do deserve. 

Conductive Philosophy finds principles which encour- 
age a conviction that, when the whole history of the 
World is made up, there will be brought to a Conductive 
triumphant finish a perfect scheme for the philosophy 
greatest possible blessedness of the whole hopeful - 
family of God. Reason sees that the enormity and ter- 
ribleness of sin inhere in the fact that it is a personal 
matter between The Creator and finite spirits. Reason 
cannot discover how The Creator can forgive, love, and 
help a spirit against whom he is arrayed by his diversity 
of character, his personal indignation, his justice, and his 
devotion to that moral excellence for the production of 
which the universe is created. And yet, Reason finds 
ground for hope in the fact that God is a Person; for in 
his personal nature there may be a reserve of resources 
and of principles which can remedy every evil except 
the determinate will of a free Person. And when Reason 
admits that in God there may be plural personality, it 
sees, in the relations of the Divine Persons to each 
other, possibilities of personal considerations, personal 
influences, and personal performances, that encourage a 



94 RELATIONS OF GOD AND MEN 

hope that, through spiritual and moral agencies, the lov- 
ing Father may effect a salvation of men consistently 
both with his own character and the freedom of men's 
Wills. Reason believes that The Creator never would 
have given life to men if there had not been, before 
creation, ample security of blessedness to an innumer- 
able host of the errant, tempted, and wretched children 
of God. 

Reason cannot forecast the methods and acts by 
„ . .. which The Creator would effect the rescue of 

Requisites 

inhuman men, but it can indicate some of the princi- 
ples that would be operative, and some of the 
lines along which the methods would act. 

Salvation from sin cannot be effected by force. It 
must indeed begin in God, because men have to be 
saved from themselves. Somehow, some time, somewhere, 
there must appear in God something that harmonizes 
justice with mercy, honors the broken laws, allays the 
righteous indignation of the outraged personal Creator, 
and covers the dishonored man with some other person- 
ality, holy, innocent, and excellent. 

It must change the man's mind, and convert his heart 
to a love of God, and his spirit to a willing obedience. 
It cannot narcotize the man, but must master him in his 
full pride of intellect, and in the dominant career of his 
self-will. 

It is rational and reasonable that salvation should 

come through a revelation, by which men can 

Through be taug;ht God's rights and character as 

revelations. ° ° 

Ruler, at the same time that he is displayed 
in a personality that wins love. 

It is rational and reasonable that salvation should 
come through spiritual operations of God. In the pre- 



SALVATION 95 

ceding pages we have analyzed human nature and moral 
science till we have recognized that moral Throu h 
life, for good or evil, is spiritual life of men spiritual 
in relation to the personal life of God as a agency - 
Spirit. There, where sin meets its condemnation, the 
remedial agencies must be set in action. 

It is rational and reasonable to expect the salvatory 
help to come both by divine control of general lines of 
men's social conditions and personal circumstances, in 
long processes, with many relapses and wrecks of society, 
and by immediate presentation to, and influence on, the 
spirits of men. Spirit is Sovereign in men; and so, sal- 
vation must come in ways that turn hearts towards God, 
install moral habits in men's souls, and establish God as 
Lord and Father of Spirits. 



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